Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: darcs vs tla

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Catalin" == Catalin Marinas <address@hidden> writes:

    Catalin> A second problem I think is Haskell. Not so many people
    Catalin> can help with coding

Haskell is no harder than Lisp in principle, and if you'll go back in
this list a bit you'll find a thread on Lisp and parentheses where
asuffield makes a really convincing case (to me, anyway) that
Haskell's presentation with minimal parentheses plus the "offsides
rule" is far more readable than Lisp.  I think it's reasonable to
suppose that people who want to help with darcs can learn enough
Haskell to do so.

    Catalin> and it is also much slower than C or C++.  The today's
    Catalin> compilers are not smart enough to optimally deal with
    Catalin> pure functional languages.

Please confirm it's possible to compile darcs, and which compiler you
used.  I heard recently that darcs is strongly dependent on Hugs98,
which is an interpreter.  Seemed a little odd (Haskell98 is a
well-defined language, and Hugs doesn't have all that much in the way
of extensions), but that's what I heard.

    Catalin> While darcs is a nice research project, my recommendation
    Catalin> would be to stay with arch, at least until you hear
    Catalin> somebody happily using darcs with a huge source tree like
    Catalin> the Linux kernel.

I wouldn't go so far as that, but certainly I'd say to investigate
experience with a tree 3X as big as your current one, to give room to
grow while darcs does!

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