On 24/04/2007, at 1:39 am, Justin Bailey wrote:
Give me a way to get to the .NET libraries and the world is my oyster ...
I second that :-) Such access will probably become more important over time as Microsoft release more .NET-only libraries (like Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation). Hugs98.NET and GHC's Dotnet foreign calls already allow calling of .NET methods (although I haven't tried the latter). These operate at a rather low-level though. I'm working on a Haskell to .NET bridge, partially inspired by Lam's work on RubyCLR, for my undergraduate thesis this year. Hopefully it will be a viable option when completed.
It's like he built an embedded DSL for interacting with .NET. I imagine the same could be done in Haskell, though it might involve some sort of code generation technique.
A core difficulty is the mismatch between the object-oriented type system of .NET and Haskell's. This is something that RubyCLR didn't need to conquer, Ruby already having object-oriented concepts. Regards, Andrew.