Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi
Two (somewhat tangental) thoughts come to mind.
1. Should it not, in theory at least, be *relatively* easy to target Haskell at anything that has a graph reduction machine? (You target Erlang, somebody else has targetted JavaScript, I myself attempted to target Java...)
It's a fair bit of engineering work, there are some design decisions to be made - such as how to interface with the host language (if at all). Theoretically its not that hard to come up with something, but it is a fair amount of effort.
To be sure, I doubt it's what you'd call "trivial". I just ment it looks easier than, say, translating C to Pascal or something.
2. How come all these projects use Yhc? According to the wiki, Yhc doesn't even _work_ yet. What gives?
These projects use Yhc.Core - a Core language to which Haskell can be translated. At the moment, Yhc is the only compiler that can generate Yhc.Core, but Yhc.Core is a complete abstraction layer. There is currently work going on to translate GHC.Core to Yhc.Core, which would mean that you can then translate any GHC program (including rank-2-implicit-polymorphic-linear-super-ADTs etc.) to Yhc.Core, and then on to Erlang. The actual translation is trivial, but getting GHC.Core out of GHC for all the base libraries is hard.
The reason I use Yhc.Core is because its a nice standalone library, with useful tools and functionality, which is highly stable. There is no library which is comparable.
I see... [I think.]