Re: [tlug] Darcs and the Lack of Haskell Programmers

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-08-04 17:41 +0900 (Mon), Edward Middleton wrote:

> Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>
>> Surely you don't expect me to be surprised!  But ... what do you think
>> the odds are that they *could* switch to a pure-Ruby library for Darcs,
>> Mercurial, or Bazaar?

Darcs would be interesting; certain parts of it look complex enough that
I probably wouldn't trust a Ruby rewrite of them.

> Not something I have the time or inclination to try but if it can be done 
> in C it can be done in Ruby, though it would make more sense to factor out 
> the performance critical or nasty parts to a binary extension.  Has anyone 
> written haskell ruby extensions ;)

I've not, but I have written Ruby extensions, and my understanding
is that GHC's Foreign Function Interface is pretty good in the
call-Haskell-stuff-from-C direction, as well as the call-C-from-Haskell
direction.

It's an interesting thought, and something I'd like to try sometime.

I have plans to test out something similar in the next few months: we're
working on a product that is an Excel add-in, and we're wanting to write
it in Haskell instead of C or C++. I'm expecting we'll need a little bit
of C/C++ glue, but probably not too much.

cjs
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Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
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