Persistent haskell

Abstract

Persistent programming offers the prospect of seamless integration of programs with long-lived data, offering the prospect of constructing systems that allow more rapid program development, and also simplifying the process of writing applications whose purpose is to handle long-lived data. While there have been some previous attempts to produce persistent functional languages, the majority of these have been interpreted, and performance has generally been seriously compromised. It has therefore become something of a shibboleth that persistence cannot be implemented efficiently in a purely functional language. This paper offers the first systematic study of this claim. This paper describes the first-ever implementation of orthogonal persistence for a compiled purely functional language, based on an existing St Andrews persistent object store. Preliminary performance results show that it is possible to implement orthogonal persistence efficiently and there is hope that the result is more efficient than more straightforward approaches such as binary I/O. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.