"Stephen Blackheath [to GHC-iPhone]" <likeliest.complexions.stephen@blacksapphire.com> writes:
The status is that we have a working GHC-iOS compiler, and various attempts at Android but nothing easily useable - though I expect that to change very soon. Work is underway at the moment by quite a few people to finish off the rough edges of cross-compiling. So at this stage, if you want to use Haskell on mobile devices, you will still have to get your hands a bit dirty.
I don't mind getting my hands dirty, especially when the ghc-ios Wiki and this mailing list seem so helpful.
The performance of the runtime system should be very good now that we have a "registerised" code generator using LLVM (GHC's generated code is based entirely on gotos and doesn't use normal calls and call stacks, and this necessitated specific changes to LLVM). I haven't done any great measurements, though. Just remember that mobile device CPUs are significantly slower than desktop PCs, though this gap is closing.
All very good things to know, thank you.
So contrary to the myth, space leaks aren't random, and won't pop up on a new platform. You only need to test your program on one platform. Due to difficulty of profiling on a cross-compiled platform, however, you will need to write your program so it can be tested (and therefore profiled) on a PC.
That's manageable. I plan on doing all my main development on a PC running Linux and then add each platform's native UI on top.
Thanks in advance, and thanks for all the work on ghc-ios!
No worries, and I hope there's been something useful in this email!
Very useful, thank you. -- Peter Jones --- Love to Develop 303-219-0226 http://devalot.com