[Haskell-cafe] COM and Haskell

[Andrew Appleyard]

On 24/04/2007, at 1:39 am, Justin Bailey wrote:
> Give me a way to get to the .NET libraries and the world is my  
> oyster ...

I second that :-)  Such access will probably become more important  
over time as Microsoft release more .NET-only libraries (like Windows  
Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation).

Hugs98.NET and GHC's Dotnet foreign calls already allow calling  
of .NET methods (although I haven't tried the latter).  These operate  
at a rather low-level though.

I'm working on a Haskell to .NET bridge, partially inspired by Lam's  
work on RubyCLR, for my undergraduate thesis this year.  Hopefully it  
will be a viable option when completed.

> It's like he built an embedded DSL for interacting with .NET. I  
> imagine the same could be done in Haskell, though it might involve  
> some sort of code generation technique.

A core difficulty is the mismatch between the object-oriented type  
system of .NET and Haskell's.  This is something that RubyCLR didn't  
need to conquer, Ruby already having object-oriented concepts.

Regards,
Andrew.