> I am genuinely curious about this, do you really think Haskell has performance characteristics that are suitable for implementing Chromium? Haskell is wonderful for many uses, but it is difficult for me to imagine it as the basis for a modern web browser.
Short answer: yes. Long answer: profiling and diagnosing performance issues is still kind of a black art, but for large codebases I've seen Haskell rewrites outperform C++ significantly. You need talented Haskell developers, but surely Google should be able to find those. Most of the tasks that I can think of in a web browser seem like things that Haskell is ideally suited to - parsing, data transformation, rule-based logic - what is it that makes you think it would be unsuitable?
The memory consumption, especially the semi-non-determinism relating to lazy evaluation, was the first thing that popped into my mind. But, as I said in a comment below this, I think that Haskell as the common case language, with some FFI accessible code would probably fit the bill. I can not think of any large Haskell projects in the application space where browsers sit, but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done.
Short answer: yes. Long answer: profiling and diagnosing performance issues is still kind of a black art, but for large codebases I've seen Haskell rewrites outperform C++ significantly. You need talented Haskell developers, but surely Google should be able to find those. Most of the tasks that I can think of in a web browser seem like things that Haskell is ideally suited to - parsing, data transformation, rule-based logic - what is it that makes you think it would be unsuitable?