[Haskell-cafe] Haskell and JVM (was: EclipseFP (Haskell IDE) 0.9.1 released)

[Graham Klyne]

Thiago Arrais wrote:
> There is one issue, though, that touches a lot of sensitive areas. The
> Eclipse platform runs inside a Java Virtual Machine. Unfortunately,
> there isn't currently a way to compile Haskell to the JVM (at least I
> don't know of any, if someone knows, please let me know). This means
> the IDE has to be written in Java, not in Haskell. That's the price we
> are paying now. Writing a tool for a language in a different language.

Ah, now there's a thing!  I don't have any good answers, but I have a friend who
is interested in such things, and may even be looking for a project in this
area.  In our discussions, a number of links came up, but I'm not sure if I can
find them all.  Here's an attempt:

  http://www.xoltar.org/languages/nice.html
  http://www.pugscode.org/
  http://scala.epfl.ch/index.html

Nothing very specific to your ideas goal, but there's some work on compiling
functional code to JVM.

I was also talking to someone from Cambridge Comlab the other week who has an
FP-like system (for web service/portal creation) that uses JVM bytecode
modification.  maybe some useful experience to draw upon there?

I'm also reminded of a project I was in discussion about some time ago, which
was to explore use of Haskell program transformation techniques (hopefully
adapting some ideas from BMF/Squiggol) for implementing aspects of a JIT runtime
for JVM.  Unfortunately, that never took off (and was maybe too ambitious for
the effort contemplated).  There is some related work at the kestrel Institute
[http://www.kestrel.edu/home/projects/]

#g

-- 
Graham Klyne
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