[darcs-users] GHC and Darcs

Don Stewart dons at galois.com
Wed Jul 30 21:39:57 UTC 2008


me:
> Jason Dagit wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 6:34 AM, Patrick Waugh <ptwaugh at gmail.com 
> > <mailto:ptwaugh at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > 
> >     Good find.
> > 
> >     I have to say that I have to agree.
> > 
> >     I had to go back to the old version in order to get darcs-client (of
> >     darcs-server) to work, because I don't have time to learn Haskell.
> >     I'd really rather use darcs2, because of improvements, but oh well.
> > 
> > 
> > I saw your email about darcs-client and darcs-server, but I was rather 
> > confused since darcs is just darcs.  That is, there is no separate 
> > server and client components.
> 
> 
> Patrick seems to be referring to this (perhaps poorly named) 3rd-party 
> application:
> 
> http://www.equational.org/darcs-server/
> 
> Patrick: You should talk to the author of it directly, as you did with 
> Darcsweb.
> 
> > I'm starting to think that it's rather unfortunate that Darcs is so 
> > distinguished by its implementation language.
> 
> I'm still surprised how much anti-Functional venom is out there.  You 
> read some of the rants that people make about Darcs and you see some of 
> the same (false) arguments and hostility that you see if you look at 
> classic anti-Lisp rants from three decades ago.
> 
> If anything, it makes it all the weirder to me how many people on the 
> GHC team seem to be hasty to leave Darcs rather than lend their own 
> skills to improve the speed/performance/reliability of Darcs, in 
> whatever manners that they can.  It almost seems to be some sort of 
> undercurrent that even some GHC developers don't think their compiler is 
> efficient/speedy.  I'm sure that's not the case, but it certainly gives 
> the impression from some of the text/complaints on the earlier linked 
> sources.

Speaking as a GHC dev, I think the mood is more,

    a) darcs is lacking clear project direction and energy, which is
    slowing down our project, and slowing dev uptake.
 
since we know GHC produces damn fine code.

-- Don


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