[Haskell-cafe] Accounting Engine in Haskell

[Paul Johnson]

On 15/06/10 09:08, Amiruddin Nagri wrote:
>
> I wanted some insight as to how Haskell is going to help me with my 
> project. Also there has been some concerns because of lazy evaluation 
> in Haskell and memory leaks associated with it. 
> http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2010/04/haskell-vs-erlang-for-bittorent-clients.html
>

In this talk:
http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/04/27/engineering-large-projects-in-haskell-a-decade-of-fp-at-galois/
Don Stewart says that memory leaks are a tractable problem.  Just 
profile and look for the retainers.

Lazy evaluation is a big win for large projects because it lets you 
modularise your solution; one function generates a data structure, and 
another function (or several) consume it.  If the data structure is big 
or infinite then conventional languages force you to either interleave 
the generator and consumer, or else jump through lots of hoops 
re-inventing lazy evaluation on a case-by-case basis.  With Haskell you 
just say what you mean and let the compiler worry about implementing it.