On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:09 AM, Timo B. Hübel <t.h@gmx.info> wrote:

> Incidentally, I am looking for someone well versed in the JVM who wants
> to help spearhead a JVM back end for jhc.

I would love to see this! With the current advent of all those languages
targeting at the JVM (Groovy, Scala, Clojure) I think a JVM backend for a
Haskell compiler could, together with proper Java interop, make for a major
breakthrough of Haskell in general.

Unforunately, as I can tell from my halfknowledge, the JVM lacks some
important functionality required for properly targeting functional language
features on the JVM.

And here comes my question: If there is anybody with proper knowledge about
this issue, I would really like to know what are those things that are
missing? For example, Clojure lacks proper tail recrusion optimization due to
some missing functionality in the JVM. But does anybody know the details?

My brief research into why the JVM lacks tail calls indicated that tail calls do not play nicely with the JVM security model and make stack traces harder to manage. Although, I have also heard that tail call of some form is expected to appear in java 1.7.

Jason