On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 10:42:26AM +1000, Tony Morris wrote:
I have hypothesised a pure, lazy language on the JVM and perhaps the .NET CLR with FFI to .NET/Java libraries. I foresee various problems but none that are catastrophic; just often requiring a compromises, sometimes very unattractive compromises. I have authored several libraries in the same vain as pure, lazy programming to run on the JVM in Java and Scala programming languages.
Yes, I have done some design work on a JVM back end for JHC, which seems quite doable and has been on my todo list for a while.
I expect others have forethought and perhaps even experimented with such a language. Are there any dangers to be wary of that undo the entire endeavour?
There have been a couple papers published on it, the main sticking point seems to be tail call elimination. When targeting real hardware you always had the option of dropping to assembly to do a direct jump, but there isn't an equivalent in the JVM. If you look up tail call + jvm you will probably get a few hits. I believe there are even a couple haskell specific papers on the issue. If you just want something that works and isn't necessarily the most efficient, you can do something like implement the G-machine in java, you would then have a VM on a VM though.. but it would work and be straightforward. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ - http://notanumber.net/