Re: [Haskell-iPhone] Objective C bindings?

I am banking on the iOS cross-compiler either eventually supporting TH or that we can alter GHC such that TH can be eliminated in a pre-processing step. (Most of the code generated with language-c-inline code is usually foreign code anyway) Manuel Jake Brownson :

I did some googling on the TH issue. I was already vaguely familiar that it was a problem in cross compliers. I'm sure I'm not pointing out anything you guys don't already know, but just to show what I was able to find myself. This seemed to the the most obvious information on the topic is in this thread: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2013-June/001473.html

There seem to be a couple of self-described hacks to work around the issue by preprocessing the TH of sorts: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Template_Haskell_on_impossible_architectures/ http://hackage.haskell.org/package/zeroth

From my ~hour of googling it looks like there was hope to get a (hacky?) TH cross compiler patch set from the GHCJS project merged in to 7.8, and the 7.8 release notes talk about improved cross compilation support, but I take it those patches didn't make it in?

It seems like there are several folks including yourselves pushing in the direction of getting Haskell to run w/ nice bindings on iOS, and the TH cross compiler problem is the biggest hurdle remaining. Is the current thinking that we have to find a way to do it w/o proper TH, or is there still hope that we can have it and get an incredible solution like language-c-inline going?

Is the problem a lack of interest from the folks qualified to make changes to GHC? It it in progress and just not making a lot of noise? I'm not sure how the community works :)

I'm pretty seriously interested in this capability and would offer assistance moving forward w/ it. I'm really tired of using C++ to write apps, and have really fallen in love w/ Haskell over the past few months. It seems like there are already a number of folks w/ longer Haskell backgrounds than myself who have tried so I'm not sure what more I have to offer, but I offer it.

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 4:10 AM, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:

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The problem with language-c-inline for iOS at the moment is that it relies on TH in a very essential way.

Manuel

Jake Brownson :

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Thanks for the tips guys, and thanks to Luke for his work in this area!

I came across ObjectiveHaskell but got the idea that it was more for calling HS from ObjectiveC, but I think I got the wrong idea looking closer. The samples all still have a bunch of .m files in with them. It'd be awesome to purely have .hs files which I believe HOC would allow.

However as I was searching for ObjectiveHaskell on hackage I came across the language-inline-c project which is still in development, but looks really interesting: https://github.com/mchakravarty/language-c-inline/wiki/Motivation

It uses quaiquoting to let you write objective-c or c directly inline in a .hs file and it'll compile it and hook up all the values automatically (or that's what I get from reading the website anyway, haven't tried it yet).

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 11:25 PM, Luke Iannini wrote:

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Yo Jake, Yeah, what Max said. Sigh, I've done this (updated OH to use Max's static lib support, fixed a bunch of bugs, and other things) an have been promising to clean it up enough to release for quite some time. The yucky bit is that I manually converted it to strip out the Template Haskell usage which both makes it much uglier and not nearly as nice to use. But it works, and that's something : ), so I'll get going.

I think we could design something even nicer with Type Families sometime that didn't require TH.

Cheers Luke

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 9:27 PM, Maxwell Swadling wrote:

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Hello!

I think ObjectiveHaskell is a more practical choice today than HOC.

ObjectiveHaskell could be cleaned up to use the new GHC 7.8 features, which will simplify the build process.

https://github.com/jspahrsummers/ObjectiveHaskell/tree/reboot

Try it out.

__END__ Maxwell Swadling

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On 23 Apr 2014, at 11:25 am, Jake Brownson wrote:

https://code.google.com/p/hoc/

Is anybody aware of any efforts to revive the HOC project that provides Objective-C bindings for Haskell? Or any alternatives to it? It seems like it would be a great complement to the iOS cross compiler. I've started reading through the code to see what it might take to get them working w/ recent GHCs. the last commit on the google code project was 2010.

When I do the "runhaskell Setup.hs build" from the installation instructions I get a few things like this:

"Unacceptable argument type in foreign declaration: CInt"

which seems to be explained by this as due to a change in FFI at some point: http://haskell.1045720.n5.nabble.com/zlib-build-failure-on-recent-GHC-td4971...

I'm just starting to dig into this so maybe there's a good reason nobody else has. I'm pretty new to Haskell, but I love the idea of making native GUIs for OS X and eventually iOS. _______________________________________________ iPhone mailing list iPhone@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/iphone

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