this IRC conversation on my page should be instructive (I am "rindolf" there). Essentially, even an elegant dinky "log analyser" that people showed me how to write properly using ghc segfaulted. And I don't mean thrown an exception - it segfaulted. As much as I like Haskell, I still think the language has many inherent limitations due to its restrictive design decisions, and ghc still has many bugs, and is a huge memory hog (possibly due to a good reason). Haskell and ghc are still fine to play with and highly enlightening, but I'd never use them in anything "industrial strength", that I want to depend on.

Someone I talked with on IRC, said he'd like to create an alternative operating system written in Haskell, that would be incompatible with Linux. Then when I said no one will use it because it won't run any UNIX (or Windows for that matter) applications, he said that "fine, we can implement a nice POSIX emulation subsystem in a jail.". The reason GNU/Linux was successful was because the GNU run-time and other open-source UNIX/POSIX programs were ported to it easily, and in time it also proved attractive to vendors of commercial and/or non-FOSS software. If the Linux kernel was incompatible with anything else, it would have faded into obscurity.

So I don't see why I should use the new OS with a POSIX-compatible system that will run everything I'm using now more slowly, less natively and less reliably. Granted, the C/UNIX/TCP/IP system is not without its inherent philosophical problems, but everything today relies on it too much. In a Star Trek screenplay I started writing (a fan-fiction of sorts) I whimsically contemplated that their tricorder still runs a UNIX-based OS, and can be operated in X mode from the command line. I'm not sure UNIX (whether Linux, BSD or a different kernel) will still be prevalent 300 years from now, but we cannot rule it out.

My experience told me that such grand re-inventing everything from scratch schemes tend to amount to very little of promise. (And yes - I've tried some of them myself). Inertia is important and like it or not, reality needs to be obeyed in order to be conquered.

In short - nice hack, but not terribly useful. The kernel developers are likely to reject Haskell modules, and I would too in their shoes. Now, it's time for Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Tcl, PHP, etc. to reciprocate... ;-)