[Fwd: F#]

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

"D. Tweed" <tweed@cs.bris.ac.uk> wrote,

> On Thu, 30 May 2002, Don Syme wrote:
> 
> > going to provide.  Given the general complexity of GHC, the longish
> > compile times and the reliance of the GHC library implementation on C
> > and C libraries in so many places I decided to implement a simpler
> > language from scratch.  I like the idea that a .NET compiler should be
> > under 10K lines of code if at all possible, as is the case for F#.
> 
> Idle curiosity: which aspects of the Haskell language are the ones that
> make it complicated -- e.g., long-time stuff like lazy evaluation,
> typeclasses & inferrence, etc or newer stuff like functional dependencies,
> etc or something else entirely -- and do they only make it complicated in
> the context of the .NET architecture or in any implementation? (I'm just
> interested in that there's little chance of Haskell becoming more
> widespread if it's daunting enough to dissuade implementors.)

I think, the probelm is .NET, not Haskell.  .NET just
doesn't deliver on its promise (= marketing hype) of
language neutrality.  The problem is that .NET is language
neutral only as long as all languages are sufficiently close
to C#.  Not just Haskell, but widely used languages like C++
run into this problem, too (see .NET's Managed C++).

Cheers,
Manuel