| "The GHC compiler for .NET is currently under development at | Microsoft Research, Cambridge". | | Hmm. That location sounds familiar :-) Does anyone know if this is | actually going to happen? Or if there's any code anywhere, however | experimental, to try? It'd make a lot of sense to give GHC a .NET back end, and it's a question that comes up regularly. The reason that we haven't done it here, at GHC HQ, is because it's a more substantial undertaking than might at first appear (see below). Furthermore, it'd permanently add a complete new back-end platform for us to maintain. Given our rather limited development effort (= Simon and me), we have so far not bitten the bullet, and we have no immediate plans to do so. It'd be a good, well-defined project for someone else to tackle, and there is some good groundwork already done: * Sigbjorn Finne did a simple interop implementation that allows a Haskell program to be compiled to native code (as now) but to call .NET programs via a variant of the FFI. I don't think this work is in active use, and I'd be surprised if it worked out of the box, but it could probably be revived with modest effort * Andre Santos and his colleagues at UFPE in Brazil are working on a .NET back end, that generates CLR IL, though I don't know where they are up to. * GHC.Net would be extra attractive if there was a Visual Studio integration for GHC. Substantial progress on this has been made in 2004 by Simon Marlow, Krasimir Angelov, and Andre Santos and colleagues. There may be others that I don't know of. If anyone wants to join in this effort, do contact the above folk. And please keep us informed! Simon Here's a summary of why it's a non-trivial thing to do: - The first thing is to generate native CLR Intermediate Language (IL). That's not really hard. Requires thinking about representations for thunks and functions, and it may not be particularly efficient, but it can surely be done. An open question is about whether to generate verifiable IL or not. The trouble here is that Haskell's type system is more expressive than the CLR's in some ways, notably the use of higher-kinded type variables. So, to generate verifiable IL one is bound to need some run-time casts, and it's not clear how to minimise these. At first blush this is *all* you need do. But it isn't! - Next, you need to think about how to inter-operate with .NET libraries. You don't really want to write "foreign import..." for each and every import. You'd like GHC to read the CLR meta-data directly. But there are lots of tricky issues here; see the paper that Mark Shields and I wrote about "Object-oriented style overloading for Haskell". - Now you need to figure out how to implement GHC's primitive operations: the I/O monad arbitrary precision arithmetic concurrency exceptions finalisers stable pointers software transactional memory Not all of these are necessary, of course, but many are used in the libraries. The CLR supports many of them (e.g. concurrency) but with a very different cost model. - Last, you have to figure out what to do for the libraries. GHC has a pretty large library, and you either have to implement the primops on which the library is based (see previous point), or re-implement it. For example, GHC's implementation of I/O uses mutable state, concurrency, and more besides. For each module, you need to decide either to re-implement it using .NET primitives, or to implement the stuff the module is based on. These challenges are mostly broad rather than deep. But to get a production quality implementation that runs a substantial majority of Haskell programs "out of the box" requires a decent stab at all of them.