Re: [darcs-users] Re: [BK] upgrade will be needed

Tomasz Zielonka
2005-02-18T11:03:02Z

On Fri, Feb 18, 2005 at 10:09:00AM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> darcs scares me a bit because it's in haskell, I don't believe very much
> in functional languages for compute intensive stuff, ram utilization
> skyrockets sometime (I wouldn't like to need >1G of ram to manage the
> tree).

AFAICS, most of memory related problems in darcs are not necessarily a
result of using Haskell.

> Other languages like python or perl are much slower than C/C++ too but
> at least ram utilization can be normally dominated to sane levels with
> them and they can be greatly optimized easily with C/C++ extensions of
> the performance critical parts.

With those languages, you often have no other choice than resorting to
C. GHC is quite a good compiler and I've often been able to get my
programs run almost as fast as programs written in C++ - however, if I
were to write those programs in C++, I would never do that, despite
being quite a good C++ programmer.

Also, in Haskell you can use extensions written in C, as easily or even
easier than in Python or Perl (I've done this in Perl, heard the battle
stories about C extensions in Python). Haskell's FFI is quite good,
there are also many supporting tools.

Best regards
Tomasz

--
Szukamy programisty C++ i Haskell'a: http://tinyurl.com/5mw4e