[Haskell-cafe] Haskell/JDK/tail-calls etc. (please vote on bug No. 6804517)

[Stephen Sinclair]

On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Karel Gardas <karel.gardas at centrum.cz> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> from time to time request for Haskell running on top of Java's VM pops
> on the haskell related mailing list and then usually dies off when
> someone mentions that JDK does not have proper support for tail-calls. I
> think haskell community might do something with this fact or at least
> attempt to do something with it. I think the proper request for
> enhancement is here:
> http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6804517
>
> if you agree with it (as it's proposed on the rfe's mentioned blog
> article[1]), then please either join or if you are already a member of
> SDN then just login and vote for this bug. That's something we can do
> for free and will take just few minutes yet perhaps push a little bit
> more weight behind this bug (err, just 4 votes now, why's that?).

Even if tail recursion is not properly supported, I've never really
understood why this is an *total* impediment to getting it working on
the JVM.  I mean, yes it sucks, but there are ways to do it anyway
(trampolining for one).  They are usually _slow_ methods (which
trampoline is), but if it's the difference between being able to run
on the JVM and not, you would think that someone would think running
on JVM slowly is better than not running on it at all...

Maybe that's not the case though, maybe it would actually be bad for
Haskell's rep to run slowly on JVM compared to other languages.

Steve