On Sun, Jul 08, 2012 at 09:21:08AM -0600, Jonathan Geddes wrote:
I agree that the Raison d'être for a .NET or JVM backend is interop. Perhaps that's not worth the effort of an entirely new backend. JavaScript is a different beast, however. I said before:
From my point of view, languages that cannot run on one of the 3 aforementioned platforms will become irrelevant. (with the exception of C, of course).
I'll take that one step further and say that for web applications it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify using a language that WILL NOT run both client and server. JavaScript (with NodeJS), Clojure (with ClojureScript), and Dart are just a few examples.
I really believe that with a solid JavaScript backend, Haskell would be an ideal web application language. Am I alone in that belief? What can I do to get the ball rolling on that?
I should point out that the ball already IS rolling -- ranging from EDSLs that compile to JavaScript [1,2] to macro systems [3] to more serious full-featured efforts [4,5]. There's even a wiki page listing all these and more [6]. The yesod developers share your view that Haskell would benefit from some sort of JavaScript backend; see [7] as well as the ensuing discussion on Reddit [8]. See also Elm [9], which compiles to HTML+CSS+JavaScript and has some Haskell integration [10]. Rather than trying to start yet another effort, what about contributing to one of these ongoing ones? -Brent [1] http://www.ittc.ku.edu/csdlblog/?p=88 [2] http://www.ittc.ku.edu/csdl/fpg/node/125 [3] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/JMacro [4] http://uu-computerscience.github.com/uhc-js/ [5] https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs [6] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_JavaScript_Problem [7] http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2012/04/client-side [8] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/sm72n/client_side_yesod_an_frpinspi... [9] http://elm-lang.org/ [10] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/uugne/announcing_elm_02_haskell_int...