As to your porting of Haskell to the JVM question; the JVM would be unable to perform all the optimizations that GHC can do.  There is really not much point in running slow code.

JavaScript is interesting since the JIT compiler gets better all the time.


On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:02 PM, Jonathan Geddes <geddes.jonathan@gmail.com> wrote:
Venerable Haskell Hackers,

I love Haskell and think it should run everywhere. Now supposing I would like to build another backend for GHC, perhaps for Java Bytecode, .Net CIL, or JavaScript, What would be the best way to approach that? I can think of a few options:

1. Produce External Core with -fext-core and compile that with a completely separate compiler
2. Use the GHC apis to build a compiler that reuses a load of GHC's code, but has it's own backend
3. Add a new backend directly into GHC

Any other options?

While I'm on the subject, why has Haskell not been ported to the likes of the JVM, .NET CLR, or JavaScript? Are Haskell's non-strict semantics just too different from the semantics of these other platforms? 

SPJ is known for saying that Haskell's plan for world domination is support for many parallelism/concurrency idioms. I believe running on many platforms is just as important. 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).

Thoughts?

--J Arthur

_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe




--
--
Regards,
KC