Darcs: distributed version management in haskell

A common reaction from people who hear about darcs, the source control system I created, is that it sounds like a great tool, but it is a shame that it is written in Haskell. People think that because darcs is written in Haskell it will be a slow memory hog with very few contributors to the project. I will give a somewhat historical overview of my experiences with the Haskell language, libraries and tools.I will begin with a brief overview of the darcs advanced revision control system, how it works and how it differs from other version control systems. Then I will go through various problems and successes I have had in using the Haskell language and libraries in darcs, roughly in the order I encountered them. In the process I will give a bit of a tour through the darcs source code. In each case, I will tell about the problem I wanted to solve, what I tried, how it worked, and how it might have worked better (if that is possible).