[Haskell-cafe] Re: Microsoft's Singularity Project and Haskell

[Thomas DuBuisson]

> And note that we wouldn't need unsafePerformIO for the FFI if all
> programs were made in Haskell ;).

Perhaps that's true, though entirely unrealistic, in the application
world.  In the OS world you need access to machine registers and
special instructions (CR3 anyone? CP15?) which isn't built into any
language save assembly - for these FFI will always come in handy.

Also, Haskell continues to have an unfortunate lack of primitives
suitable for casting types (ex: zero copy form a bytestring like
entity to Word32s).  In this realm FFI can outperform cleaner looking
code that must rely on individual byte reads.

Cheers,
Thomas