[Haskell-cafe] killer app sought

[Mark Wotton]

On 04/10/2009, at 4:22 PM, James Britt wrote:

> Mark Wotton wrote:
>
> > So, I'm asking you guys. What are some really nice Haskell  
> libraries or
> > apps that could benefit from being shown off in one of the  
> plethora of
> > slick, mature web frameworks that exist in Ruby? Manuel Chakravarty
> > suggested something with vector operations in order to take  
> advantage of
> > his 'accelerate' library (once it gets a GPU backend, of course),  
> and
> > more generally, something taking advantage of Haskell's support for
> > multicore would be cool. (The standard edition of Ruby is still  
> unicore,
> > I believe.)
>
> I've been trying to think of a nice back-end app to run via a Ramaze  
> Web front end, to combine the best of Ruby Web dev with the speed  
> and elegance of Haskell.  As mentioned, something that demonstrated  
> multi-core-ability out of the box would be sweet.
>
> Some thoughts came to mind on image or audio manipulation, though  
> details escape me.    Or maybe text analysis.
>
> Showing that using Haskell is faster than using Ruby would be nice,  
> but unimpressive, insomuch as people can already do that with C.   
> So, a good example might also play off of the benefit of writing in  
> Haskell instead of C.

The interesting thing is speed _and_ safety, I guess. although writing  
fast C on multicore is arguably harder than in Haskell.
The Parsec suggestion is interesting, but from the outside, it  
wouldn't seem significantly different to doing it in C. Maybe if you  
could specify your own grammars from outside? Hm.

Mark