[Haskell-cafe] Building "production stable" software in Haskell

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi Peter,

> The way I see it as a newcomer, Haskell shifts the typical imperical
> programming bugs like null pointers and buffer overruns towards
> "space/time leaks", causing programs that either take exponentially long
> to complete, stack overflow, or fill up the swap file on disc because
> they consume gigabytes of memory.

Time bugs are quite rare - usually a simple profiling will fix them
up, and they are exactly the same sorts of bugs that exist in an
imperative programming language. Usually its a case of picking a
better algorithm, or thinking clever thoughts.

Space leaks are much more tricky - there are profiling tools, but I've
never got enough experience using them to say anything more than that.

> Other bugs I found are incomplete
> pattern matches at runtime, but I already got an email of how to fix
> this using an external tool

Did the email suggest using Catch? http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/catch/

If you care enough about pattern matching, you can eliminate them all
statically.

Thanks

Neil