Question

I want to write a video editing software, and the “logical” conclusion is that the language I must to use is C++… But I don’t like it (sorry c++ fans)

I would like to write it with something cool, like Lisp or Haskell or Erlang… But I don’t know if the open source implementation of those languages (I don’t have money to buy licenses) let me made a competitive software (in the performance area)

What do you think? what do you recommend?

Answer 1

I can’t speak to Lisp, but both Erlang and Haskell are capable of the performance necessary for video processing. Achieving that performance is likely to be more difficult than with C++ because there are fewer existing libraries in the domain, so you’ll have to implement more yourself. Which means you’ll have to be capable of writing high-performance code yourself. In Haskell I expect this would require a significant investment of time (6 months minimum) to become proficient.

Which language you choose should depend a great deal upon the goals of the project. If it’s a hobby project, or you want to learn a lot about processing algorithms (and therefore don’t mind having to do a lot of low-level coding yourself), there’s nothing wrong with using an out-of-mainstream language. Haskell has bindings to a lot of things you would probably want to use eventually, such as a wrapper for GLSL.

As somebody working with audio processing (including real-time), I can say that Haskell’s performance hasn’t been a problem for me. For a recent project I did write some functions in C, but that was necessary to implement a custom vectorization scheme. Doing high-level work in Haskell and calling out to C when necessary is a perfectly valid approach, although thankfully it’s less necessary now than in the past.

Of course, this presumes a few things about the nature of your project. If you want something you can use right away, Haskell, Lisp, and Erlang are probably not the languages for you because there are fewer resources. Have you considered Processing? It’s Java, I don’t know if you consider that better than C++ or worse.

I had motivations besides productivity for working in Haskell (and my productivity took a big hit for a while), without those other goals I wouldn’t have persevered. If you want to write something to use it, stick with what’s going to be most productive. If you have other motivations, tell us what they are and it’s more likely people will make helpful suggestions.