On 3/27/06, Paul Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Is there a market that is poorly served by the incumbent languages for > which Haskell would be an absolute godsend? >
As far as I'm concerned, yes almost every market. At least soon. Within a few years (say, five) we will have tens of cores on the desktop. The speed of an application will correspond fairly directly to how well it uses multiple threads. This will only become more and more true in the future. Haskell (lightweight threads + STM) really is a godsend in this area. It's really not feasible to distribute a general application to tens or hundreds of threads in C++ (or any imperative langauge, really). Some specific problems (e.g. raytracing) are simple enough to be easily parallellised in any language, but in general we need purely functional programming with good support for concurrency and parallellism if we are to have any hope of remaining sane while using these massively multicore systems of the future effectively. Haskell (or rather GHC) is ideal here. Parallellising pure functions are fairly easy, for concurrency I think message passing and immutable values are really pretty the best story right now, and even if you decide you need some layer of shared-state concurrency we can remain pretty safe using STM. /S -- Sebastian Sylvan +46(0)736-818655 UIN: 44640862 _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell