On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 9:55 AM, AbdulSattar Mohammed wrote:

WinRT has a concept of projections that expose its API. Microsoft has implemented projections for Native (C and C++), HTML/Javascript and .NET (from Miguel de Caza's WinRT demystified post: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Sep-15.html). There's no mention of creating your own projections (or I have seen none). I don't see any reason why we can't create our own projections. If it's possible a Haskell projection could really help.

Yep, that's what I was thinking of. I'm pretty sure the C/C++ projections rely on compiler extensions for the MS C/C++ compiler, so I don't think we could use those directly from Haskell. Antoine

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 8:11 PM, Antoine Latter wrote:

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On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 5:12 AM, AbdulSattar Mohammed wrote:

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I suppose this should go into the GUI mailing list, but it is filled with spam. So, WinRT does not depend on the .NET Framework. C++ applications can directly compile to x86 and be able to use WinRT. Do we have a room for Haskell development there?

From what I understand, WinRT is a set of COM libraries - C++ can directly compile to it because the MS C++ compiler has special extensions to handle the COM resources in the library.

There is a COM library for Haskell:

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/com

But I've never used it.

The API is encoded in a special meta-data format, which is then used by C++, .NET and Javascript to create the language-specific APIs - it might be possible to generate Haskell bindings to the COM components from this metadata.

Antoine

-- Warm Regards,

AbdulSattar Mohammed