[Haskell-cafe] GHC for .NET?

[Andre Santos]

Hi,

[only now I am catching up with the messages from the
beginning of the year from haskell-cafe...]

Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
>   * Andre Santos and his colleagues at  UFPE in Brazil are working on a
> .NET back end,
> 	that generates CLR IL, though I don't know where they are up to.
> 
>   * GHC.Net would be extra attractive if there was a Visual Studio
> integration for GHC.
> 	Substantial progress on this has been made in 2004 by Simon
> Marlow, Krasimir
> 	Angelov, and Andre Santos and colleagues.

We are indeed involved in these two projects,
with support from Microsoft's academic/research initiatives.

Due to various delays we have not progressed much in the
implementation of the .NET back end for GHC itself,
but we will be working a lot more on this from now on.
We have a group (with some graduate and postgraduate students)
who have studied compilation alternatives and some
of the existing implementations, and we are
working now on a prototype implementation to start with,
still focusing only on compiling the Haskell standard to IL/.NET.
Then we should roughly try to follow the steps SimonPJ described.

For the Visual Studio integration with GHC we have released a "preview"
about a month ago with partial results of the efforts by
SimonM/Krasimir/us, and we should also keep this development going.
Although it currently has no dependencies with .NET code generation,
it will be really nice if we manage to integrate the two, eventually.
But even the use of the IDE itself (with tooltips, on-the-fly
type checking, code completion etc.)
should be quite an improvement for the whole Haskell
programming/teaching experience.

cheers,

Andre.