[Haskell-cafe] Re: More on the random idea

[Simon Marlow]

Stefan O'Rear wrote:
> On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 07:41:19PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
>>> The #haskell people have been working on this for about 3 years now.
>>> The result is the 'runplugs' program, which I've talked about in
>>> previous mails.
>>>
>>>    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/lambdabot/scripts/RunPlugs.hs
>>>
>>> It uses hs-plugins for the evaluation, along with the points about IO
>>> prevention via type checking, resource limits controlled by the OS, 
>>> language extension preventions, and a trusted (audited) module base.
>>>
>>> The security mechanisms were briefly described in the 2004 hs-plugins
>>> paper, if I recall, but otherwise, I don't think we've documented the 
>>> techniques. Maybe we should, as many issues have been encountered over
>>> the years, further and further constraining the kinds of things that are
>>> allowed.
>>>  
>> For me, the unfortunate thing is that there seems to be no interpreter 
>> for Haskell written in Haskell. (Except for GHC, which is *huge*.) We
> 
> Actually, there exists no interpreter for Haskell.  Period.

Historical note: the first implementation of GHCi (by Alastair Reid) was a pure 
interpreter, IIRC.  The second implementation, which was the predecessor to the 
current implementation, was also a pure interpreter, but we rewrote it to use a 
bytecode compiler/interpreter before it was ever released.  The development 
history is all in darcs, if you care to take a look..

Cheers,
	Simon