[etherealG]

surely if mainstream is the thing you want, then more people using haskell would solve that? I don't see how moving to another language helps the mainstream problem, actually it hinders it since less people will be using your new language than are using haskell already.

[teamonkey]

"Mainstream" isn't the only reason given for not using Haskell. He also says that lazy evaluation is a bad default (too costly) for games and the syntax is too complicated.

[nightski]

The syntax too complicated bit bugs me. Haskell syntax is very minimal, more lisp like than C like. The syntax is "different" than traditional imperative languages but coming from Lisp/Scheme/F# background it was very easy to pick up.

I am not sure I buy that lazy evaluation is too costly either, as it is actually what buys performance gains in some areas. That was a broad statement and it doesn't hold everywhere but I just want to say that it isn't cut & dry like you make it sound.

I would say the only argument he makes against Haskell that I totally agree with is its inference engine. I have very mixed feelings about type inference. It is very nice because it makes everything so concise, yet I often find myself writing function types just for clarity. Also type errors are not fun to track down as he shows in the slide.

[jerf]

As much as I like Haskell, I would be nervous about using it in a AAA-class game engine. The space leaks that lazy evaluation can produce could end up even harder to debug than usual in such a complicated product.

Please note I said "nervous", not "I would never consider it ever". Another couple of years of development and I might be less nervous; Haskell has been making a lot of progress lately. Some stuff in the absolute inner core might still be C or Assembler, but I could see the bulk switching to some other language.

[saucetenuto]

Space leaks are the real problem, and not just for the reason you state.

These days it's hard to even buy a computer with less than a gig of RAM, but the Playstation 3 - the most powerful console of the new generation - has only 256 megs. Granted, they're 256 really fast megs, but it's still a tiny amount of space by modern standards. You don't even have a hard drive to swap to when you run out of space - if a memory allocation fails, you work around it by hand or you crash.

If you're going to write a game engine that's meant to run on consoles, you really need fine-grained control of all the memory allocation in your system. That'd be my big worry with Haskell, more than speed or garbage collection latency or whatever.