Eduardo Costa on small Haskell compilers: > Besides, it becomes easier to install, and uninstall. For instance, > Dr. Alcimar (that you know quite well) is finishing his prosthetic arm > for amputees. Clean was able to produce code that was small enough, > uses heap sparingly, and was fast enough to do the pattern recognition > of electric myographic signals using a novel algorithm created by Dr. > Pascoarelli. The program must be small because it runs on a laptop computer, > with little memory (one can not ask an amputee fetching a large computer). I'm not 100% clear if what you're describing is an embedded system (in which case as others have said, object code size seems more significant), but I don't think ghc (for example) is such a resource hog as you imply. (In saying which I'm not waiving my right to complain on ghc-users about code-bloat and other infelicitudes, Simon, Simon, and Sigbjørn. <g>) ghc runs pretty happily on my laptop (and would run better yet if "Mobile Pentium II" chips weren't such a misnomer). I must admit that while I'm not free from complaints about ghc, the priorities of the team seem broadly correct, from this end. Wraggling with the nuances of the type system may not the sort of snappy bullet point priority one one stress if one were seeking to flog Haskell as a 'product', but as a user of the language, they're the sorts of thing I bump my nose into fairly regularly, and if people like Simon (and Mark) aren't going to address them, who is? (I shall refrain from belly-aching about collection types and the like, for the nonce...) Cheers, Alex.
