Hi
Some time ago I became interested in compilation of Haskell programs (via Yhc Core) to Erlang to be able to run Haskell code in Erlang environment.
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.
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. Thanks Neil