[Yhc] Suitability of yhc for handheld Haskell

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi Tony,

On the Haskell IRC [http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/HaskellIrcChannel] a
user named stepcut mentioned they were thinking about porting yhc to
PalmOS, and I think they did some initial work. Unfortunately I don't
have a real world address/name for them.

>From what I remember, the issues they mentioned to me were:

* No support for a 64bit long at all
* Lack of GMP for PalmOS
* No real files


> So, my question to you is: Would you advise active use of the yhc
> code as a basis for our handheld work?  Is it stable enough to be
> useful for this at this point?  We can probably put up with
> deficiencies at the compiler end since we don't expect to write very
> large or complex programs in the near future but we need the runtime
> to be stable so we can be sure of the port.  Or should we wait?  Any
> other comments?

The compiler is under active rewrite, and is not particularly stable -
but should be sufficient for what you need. The runtime is much more
stable - almost all of the changes in the last few weeks have been
minor and as a result of ports, to make it more cross platform. A port
should not require porting the compiler much, if at all - when the
compiler is self-compiling (only minor issues away from this, nothing
particularly hard) - it should run on top of the runtime.

One thing in Yhc's favour is that the code is quite clean and
standards compliant, it was rewritten from the ground up quite
recently with the goal of portability in mind.

Thanks

Neil