Mixing Haskell and C++

Question

If you had the possibility of having an application that would use both Haskell and C++. What layers would you let Haskell-managed and what layers would you let C++-managed ?

Has any one ever done such an association, (surely) ?

(the Haskell site tells it's really easy because Haskell has a mode where it can be compiled in C by gcc)

At first I think I would keep all I/O operations in the C++ layers. As well as GUI management.

It is pretty vague a question, but as I am planning to learn Haskell, I was thinking about delegating some work to Haskell-code (I learn in actually coding), and I want to choose some part where I will see Haskell benefits.

Answer 1

Here is how I see things:

• Functional languages excel at transforming things. Whenever you write programs which take an input and map/filter/reduce it, use functional constructs. Wonderful real world examples where Haskell should excel are given by web applications (you basically transform things stored in a database to web pages).
• Procedural languages (OOP languages are procedural) excel at side effects and communication between objects. They are cumbersome to use to transform data, but whenever you want to do system programming or (bidirectional) interaction with humans (user interfaces of any kind, including client-side web programming), they do the job cleanly.
• However, some may argue that user interfaces should have a functional description, I answer that well established frameworks are easy enough to use with OOP languages that one should use them this way. After all, it is natural to think of UI components in terms of objects and communication between objects.
• IO is only a tool: whenever you transform input to output, Haskell (or whatever FP language) should do the IO. Whenever you speak to a human, C++ (or whatever OOP language) should do the IO.
• Don't care about speed. When you use Haskell for the right job, it's efficient. When you use C++ or Python for the right job, it's efficient.

Therefore, let's say I'm fluent in Haskell, C, C++ and Python, here's how I write applications:

• If my application's main role is to transform data, I write it in Haskell, with possibly some low-level parts written in C (which may, in turn, call some high-tech low level parts written in C++, but I'd stick with C as an interface for portability reasons).
• If my application's main role is to interact with a user, I write it in Python (PyQt for instance), and let Python call performance-critical routines written in C++ (boost::python is pretty good as a binding generator). I may also have to call subroutines which transform or fetch data, which will be written in Haskell.
• If I have to write a part of an application in Haskell, I segregate it into a C-callable API.
• Sometimes, a Haskell application which reads things on stdin and write back on stdout is useful as a submodule (that you call with fork/exec, or whatever on your platform). Sometimes, a shell script is the right wrapper for such applications.

Answer 2

This answer is more a story than a comprehensive answer, but I used a mix of Haskell, Python and C++ for my dissertation in computational linguistics, as well as several C and Java tools that I didn't write. I found it simplest to run everything as a separate process, using Python as glue code to start the Haskell, C++ and Java programs.

The C++ was a fairly simple, tight loop that counted feature occurrences. Basically all it did was math and simple I/O. I actually controlled options by having the Python glue code write out a header full of #defines and recompiling. Kind of hacky, but it worked.

The Haskell was all the intermediate processing: taking the complex output from the various C and Java parsers that I used, filtering extraneous data, and transforming it the simple format the C++ code expected. Then I took the C++ output and transformed it into LaTeX markup (among other formats).

This is an area that you would expect Python to be strong, but I found that Haskell makes manipulation of complex structures easier; Python is probably better for simple line-to-line transformations, but I was slicing and dicing parse trees and I found that I forgot the input and output types when I wrote code in Python.

Since I was using Haskell a lot like a more-structured scripting language, I ended up writing a few file I/O utilities, but beyond that, the built in libraries for tree and list manipulation sufficed.

In summary, if you have a problem like mine, I would suggest C++ for the memory-constrained, speed-critical part, Haskell for the high-level transformations, and Python to run it all.

Answer 3

The benefit of Haskell is the powerful abstractions it allows you to use. You're not thinking in terms of ones and zeros and addresses and registers but computations and type properties and continuations.

The benefit of C++ is how tightly you can optimize it when necessary. You aren't thinking about high-minded monads, arrows, partial application, and composing pure functions: with C++, you can get right down to the bare metal!

There's tension between these two statements. In his paper “Structured Programming with go to statements,” Donald Knuth wrote

I have felt for a long time that a talent for programming consists largely of the ability to switch readily from microscopic to macroscopic views of things, i.e., to change levels of abstraction fluently.

Knowing how to use Haskell and C++ but also how and when to combine them well will knock down all sorts of problems.

The last big project I wrote that used FFI involved using an in-house radar modeling library written in C. Reimplementing it would have been silly, and expressing the high-level logic of the rest of the application would have been a pain. I kept the “brains” of it in Haskell and called the C library when I needed it.

You're wanting to do this as an exercise, so I'd recommend the same approach: write the smarts in Haskell. Shackling Haskell as a slave to C++ will probably end up frustrating you or making you feel as though you wasted your time. Use each language where its strengths lie.

Answer 4

I have never mixed both languages but your approach feels a little upside down to me. Haskell is more apt at high-level operations while C++ can be optimized and can be most beneficial for tight loops and other performance critical code.

One of the largest benefits of Haskell is the encapsulation of IO into monads. As long as this IO isn't time critical I don't see any reason to do it in C++.

For the GUI part you are probably right. There is a plethora of Haskell GUI libraries but C++ has powerful tools such as QtCreator which simplify the tedious tasks a lot.