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

[Catalin Marinas]

On Mon, 2004-11-08 at 12:03, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 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.

Maybe Haskell is no harder than LISP but if you only have an imperative
programming background, it is harder to switch to Haskell. At least LISP
allows imperative programming. What's even harder, it is a pure
functional language.

> 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.

Darcs is compiled with ghc (Glasgow Haskell compiler). There is an
ongoing thread on the darcs-user list about using darcs with the Linux
kernel -
http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2004-November/thread.html#4021

> 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!

I'm not sure but it is my impression that darcs tries to load all the
patches into memory for every merge operation. I don't know what its
behaviour would be after 1-2 years of checking in changes.

Catalin