On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 8:30 PM, Jonathan Geddes
I had hoped that compiling Haskell to C with -fvia-C (or would it be just -C?) would allow Haskell to run in new, uncharted territory such as Android (with NDK), IOS, Google's NaCl, etc. But today I learned that GHC's C backend has been deprecated! Is it more difficult than I am imagining to get Haskell to work in these environments? Is it simply a matter of low interest in this kind of work? Or something more fundamental? Am I missing something?
The C backend was never suitable for that; it couldn't cross-compile and it used some crufty Perl to apply dubious optimizations to the generated code (and never did anything interesting on x86 anyway due to lack of registers). The portable ANSI C backend, which is used to port GHC to a new platform in the absence of cross-compilation, still works — but produces rather slow code. The native and LLVM backends are much better, and there is at least some potential for cross-compilation. I believe there is work proceeding on an ARM native code generator that can be used to target Android. -- brandon s allbery allbery.b@gmail.com wandering unix systems administrator (available) (412) 475-9364 vm/sms