Right now, my priority with Atomo is consistency in the design and simplicity in the implementation. It's acting as an incubator for a ton of interesting language features at the moment (both for myself and for Slate), so I haven't made optimization a priority yet as major parts of it are constantly changing. For example, the version on Hackage has a traditional exception system, while the latest darcs changes have replaced that entirely with a condition/restart system written in Atomo.
I'd call it "fast enough," but it's no speed demon. It's pretty early on; I just started planning Atomo's design this June. There's almost certainly some low-hanging fruit when it comes to optimization, and it is something I've been keeping a close eye on for a while now. It's only been getting faster, and in my testing of GHC 7 I saw pretty substantial performance boosts for free. And that's the nice thing. It's built on a fantastic platform, which you can drop into very easily whenever you want with a nice DSL.
Glad you like it, though. I completely understand the caution when it comes to performance of such a high-level language.
I've also written a few wrappers for Haskell libraries over at http://darcsden.com/alex - see http, json, and command.
Basically, you define your methods in Haskell, and call them from Atomo; these methods can be defined as an expression (=:::), a value (=::), or some arbitrary VM action to be executed to yield a value (=:). (Admittedly those operators have gotten a bit silly.)
The definitions use QuasiQuotes for the method pattern, and can use them for expressions as well, though that's not encouraged (operator precedence and macros make it a tricky thing to do at compile time). They look a bit noisy - [$p|x foo: y|] but that'll be fixed come GHC 7, where that pesky $ is removed.
I'd call it "fast enough," but it's no speed demon. It's pretty early on; I just started planning Atomo's design this June. There's almost certainly some low-hanging fruit when it comes to optimization, and it is something I've been keeping a close eye on for a while now. It's only been getting faster, and in my testing of GHC 7 I saw pretty substantial performance boosts for free. And that's the nice thing. It's built on a fantastic platform, which you can drop into very easily whenever you want with a nice DSL.
Glad you like it, though. I completely understand the caution when it comes to performance of such a high-level language.