On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 10:41:01PM +0100, Arjan van IJzendoorn wrote:

Hello Tomasz,

...

I am mainly interested in making GHC more portable. Haskell is a great application programming language, but there are some concerns about portability of applications.

What kind of concerns?

For example, some darcs users complain about problems with building darcs on some exotic platforms (ie not Linux, OS X, Windows, FreeBSD). It would be nice if it was possible to distribute a .jar file for all such platforms. Best regards, Tomasz

Einar Karttunen writes:

Tomasz Zielonka writes:

...

For example, some darcs users complain ...

Perhaps making -keep-hc-files a bit more documented ...

This could be faster and easier to implement than creating a version of the RTS running under the JVM. ==============

More generally: do you (Tomasz and others) really think that Java, or even C/C++ is a good "portable" platform for implementing efficiently Haskell or other lazy functional languages?? I believe this has been discussed already. And GHC passed already through this stage. I don't believe the world can return to it. The RT model is different, even decently implemented tail recursion is not so easy in C, and in Java I wouldn't bet either. Moreover, I don't think that Haskell is a good way to perpetuate imperative languages as "portable platforms". While Lisp machine belongs to the past, it seems reasonable to hope that "functional hardware", with some universal implementation paradigms, will be more popular... Jerzy Karczmarczuk

I know at one time GHC had partially-working support for emitting bytecode with the "-J" switch -- see fptools/ghc/compiler/javaGen. Does anybody know what became of it? Any documentation beyond the source? - a "S. Alexander Jacobson" writes:

A lot of phones run java bytecode.

It would be nice (and rather cool) to be able to write midlets in Haskell in addition to Java....

(And there would be some irony in being able to do this in Haskell but not in Erlang on Ericson phones!)

-Alex-

______________________________________________________________ S. Alexander Jacobson tel:917-770-6565 http://alexjacobson.com

On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 karczma@info.unicaen.fr wrote:

...

Einar Karttunen writes:

...

Tomasz Zielonka writes:

...

For example, some darcs users complain ...

...

Perhaps making -keep-hc-files a bit more documented ...

This could be faster and easier to implement than creating a version of the RTS running under the JVM. ==============

More generally: do you (Tomasz and others) really think that Java, or even C/C++ is a good "portable" platform for implementing efficiently Haskell or other lazy functional languages??

I believe this has been discussed already. And GHC passed already through this stage. I don't believe the world can return to it. The RT model is different, even decently implemented tail recursion is not so easy in C, and in Java I wouldn't bet either.

Moreover, I don't think that Haskell is a good way to perpetuate imperative languages as "portable platforms". While Lisp machine belongs to the past, it seems reasonable to hope that "functional hardware", with some universal implementation paradigms, will be more popular...

Jerzy Karczmarczuk

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