Haskoin – Haskell implementation of the Bitcoin specifications

by jc123 • 12 years ago

80 20 12 years ago

Dewie2• 12 years ago

I guess the name is understandable since it is an implementation of a protocol in Haskell. But I wonder if the day Haskell becomes a mainstream language is the day when few of the apps and such built with Haskell aren't play on words or references to Haskell terminology. :)

vertex-four• 12 years ago

A lot of Python libraries contain "Py", are named after snakes, or are references to Monty Python, and that's certainly a mainstream language.

Dewie2• 12 years ago

It's certainly not weird for libraries to be references to the language or culture of the language itself. Not to mention that the name can refer to relevant technical details that are related to the language - for example, if a parser library uses applicative parsers, maybe the name of the library has some reference to applicative in the title.

I was referring to using this kind of terminology in more user-facing applications - for example xmonad (I don't know what monads have to do with tiling window managers. Maybe it has something to do with how the configuration library of xmonad is structured).

Admittedly, maybe Haskoin was a bad example in this regard.

tgkokk• 12 years ago

Most JavaScript libraries end with .js: Angular.js, Ember.js, Backbone.js, Knockout.js... And yes, JavaScript is a mainstream language (in the browser, at least).

espadrine• 12 years ago

I wish there was a comparison in the performance benchmark. What was its purpose if we cannot compare it to the mainstream Bitcoin software's performance?

tinco• 12 years ago

Why would performance be a concern for a bitcoin API? I think this projects main goal is tot provide an easily auditable typesafe implementation.

DogeDogeDoge• 12 years ago

looks nice. I wonder when we will be able to see a real type safe BTC exchange

oakwhiz2• 12 years ago

The part about this that interests me the most is that it makes the Bitcoin protocol more understandable. The code is very readable and it contains a lot of comments.

ixmatus• 12 years ago

It's funny, strong type systems are really about explicit documentation. I'm sure the comments are good but translating a spec into Haskell types is a form of strong and explicit documentation that is also functional.

smrtinsert• 12 years ago

80 columns - I'm surprised to see this honestly.

implr• 12 years ago

Awesome library, but I'm a bit worried that they chose to implement their own crypto(mostly ECDSA), instead of using an existing implementation known to be correct.

xenog4• 12 years ago

I am one of the authors of Haskoin. We have had internal discussions on this topic. It was agreed that we wanted to minimize dependencies to code written in another programming language, which was the reason we did not choose one of the existing C++ crypto libraries, such as OpenSSL. My colleague Philippe, who wrote the crypto code, deemed the existing Haskell crypto libraries unsuitable. Hence we rolled our own ECDSA.

fragsworth• 12 years ago

It's not really a problem, as long as you've got extensive test cases (perhaps with millions of randomly generated samples) to show that the implementation always has the exact same results as OpenSSL's.

Or even better, since ECDSA is used in bitcoin-qt, just show that the full bitcoin implementation has the same results as bitcoin-qt, with millions of samples.

I don't see any of that in your package though.

leoh• 12 years ago

How long did this take to write? How large is your team?

plaprade• 12 years ago

We've been working on haskoin for about one year now. At the start we were two, and now we are three.

Haskoin – Haskell implementation of the Bitcoin specifications

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