[Haskell-cafe] Haskell on the Playstation 3? :-)

[Jeremy Shaw]

At Sun, 26 Aug 2007 00:19:25 +0200,
=?UTF-8?Q?Rados=C5=82aw_Grzanka?= wrote:

> It's funny. But 5 minutes ago I was thinking: did anyone compiled
> haskell application for Palm (m68k and/or Arm) that runs on Palm OS?

I have looked into doing this in the past. Historically speaking, the
first obstacle is all the Haskell compilers I looked at required
libgmp -- which I could not get to compile for PalmOS. libgmp was used
primarily (entirely?) for supporting the Integer data type.

I believe there is now one (or more?) pure Haskell implementations of
Integer -- so, it should be easier to remove the libgmp dependency. 

I also heard wild rumors that a future version of GHC might have
backend that generates pure ANSI C. In theory, that should make it
much easier to target PalmOS.

I have never written anything for PalmOS, aside from some scheme
programs using LispMe, but I think it might be a pretty unusual
platform. For example, it seems like applications can not access for
than 4k of ram without some hackery.

Another option would be to port the yhi bytecode interpreter to run on
PalmOS. I tried this, but I ran into three problems:

 1. libgmp dependency
 2. build system requires Python (scons).
 3. I 'upgraded' to a Nokia 770, and suddenly did not care about PalmOS

There is also an old project to port nhc98 to PalmOS -- not sure if it
is still active, or how far they got. AFAIK, nothing was ever
released.

If PalmOS is really un-POSIX compatible, it may be easier to write a
custom compiler that compiles YHC or GHC Core to PalmOS. Well, the
first time you try to write a compiler from Core -> ??? is
difficult, but the second time around is a lot easier ;)

j.