Re: [Caml-list] Haskell vs OCaml

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Thursday 14 August 2008 03:46:10 David Thomas wrote:
> --- On Wed, 8/13/08, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> > I consider them all to be untested because nobody has ever done anything
> > significant using Haskell AFAIK.
>
> Besides the window manager I'm currently using... :-P

Interestingly, the number of registered installs of XMonad has increased a lot 
from only 95 in January to 542 now. However, that is still orders of 
magnitude fewer than the most popular open source software written in OCaml:

Debian and Ubuntu registered installs
-------------------------------------
184,574: FFTW (14,298 lines of OCaml)
 12,866: Unison (23,993 lines of OCaml)
  7,286: MLDonkey (171,332 lines of OCaml)
  4,365: Darcs (3,939 lines of Haskell)
  4,066: FreeTennis (7,419 lines of OCaml)
  4,057: Planets (3,296 lines of OCaml)
  3,465: HPodder (2,225 lines of Haskell)
  2,965: LEdit (2,048 lines of OCaml)
  2,822: Hevea (11,596 lines of OCaml)
  2,657: Polygen (1,331 lines of OCaml)

So:

. 8/10 of the top ten most popular OCaml/Haskell open source projects on 
Debian and Ubuntu were written in OCaml and not Haskell.

. 221,293 installs of popular OCaml software compared to only 7,830 of 
Haskell.

. 235,312 lines of well-tested OCaml code compared to only 6,164 lines of 
well-tested Haskell code.

Some of the Haskell projects (e.g. pugs and srcinst) have even *decreased* 
in popularity over the past 7 months. Indeed, Darcs was only being used to a 
significant extent by the Haskell community and the GHC developers are now 
giving up on it themselves citing awful performance as one of the main 
reasons:

  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DarcsEvaluation

Note their own benchmark results:

  Annotate: Darcs is 50x slower than Git.
  Clone: Darcs is 49x slower than Git.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e