What is the Haskell response to Node.js?

I believe the Erlang community is not envious of Node.js as it does non-blocking I/O natively and has ways to scale deployments easily to more than one processor (something not even built-in in Node.js). More details at http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/04/29/erlang-vs-node-js and Node.js or Erlang

What about Haskell? Can Haskell provide some of the benefits of Node.js, namely a clean solution to avoid blocking I/O without having recourse to multi-thread programming?


There are many things that are attractive with Node.js

  1. Events: No thread manipulation, the programmer only provides callbacks (as in Snap framework)
  2. Callbacks are guaranteed to be run in a single thread: no race condition possible.
  3. Nice and simple UNIX-friendly API. Bonus: Excellent HTTP support. DNS also available.
  4. Every I/O is by default asynchronous. This makes it easier to avoid locks. However, too much CPU processing in a callback will impact other connections (in this case, the task should split into smaller sub-tasks and re-scheduled).
  5. Same language for client-side and server-side. (I don’t see too much value in this one, however. jQuery and Node.js share the event programming model but the rest is very different. I just can’t see how sharing code between server-side and client-side could be useful in practice.)
  6. All this packaged in a single product.

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