[Haskell-cafe] Haskell/JS -- better through typeclasses?

[John A. De Goes]

I'd like this functionality, as well, but it doesn't exist, at least  
for Haskell.

If you don't need a 100% pure functional language, and don't need the  
bells and whistles of the Haskell type system, you might be interested  
in SML -- a purer relative of the more widely-known Ocaml.

There's a tool for converting SML to JavaScript: http://www.itu.dk/people/mael/smltojs/

It allows you to export SML functions so they can be called by  
JavaScript.

Moreover, it has a reactive library built in, does pretty decent  
optimization, lets you manipulate the DOM, and is up to version 4.3.5.  
Haskell doesn't have anything close!

Regards,

John A. De Goes
N-BRAIN, Inc.
The Evolution of Collaboration

http://www.n-brain.net    |    877-376-2724 x 101

On Apr 25, 2009, at 11:53 AM, Jason Dusek wrote:

>  I'd like to be able to translate Haskell to JavaScript.
>
>  Many Haskell/JS bridges provide libraries for writing complete
>  JavaScript programs in Haskell; some of them even include
>  jQuery. However, my goals are more limited -- I'd like to be
>  able to take a Haskell module and turn it into a JavaScript
>  object. For example, I'd like to write a nice parser in
>  Haskell and then reuse it on the client side. No need to
>  handle all the DOM events or implement multi-threading.
>
>  Of course, the place to start is by reading the commentary. A
>  little bit of browsing suggests some questions of strategy:
>
> .  Maybe a new backend is not the right thing? All the backends
>    seem to be for real computers with real instruction sets.
>
> .  Is it better to just work on transforming Core into JS
>    directly? It seems that "External Core" is still in limbo.
>
> .  Some translations strike me as baffling in principle. For
>    example, a value like `ones`:
>
>      ones = 1 : ones
>
>    We'd want to avoid most native JavaScript containers, it
>    seems; however, we are then unable to leverage the speed of
>    native containers.
>
>  It's entirely possible that translating Haskell to JavaScript
>  may turn out not to be the best idea; maybe it is better to
>  have a type class for types (for example, `Parser Char`) to
>  provide their own translators? The it would be straightforward
>  to prevent translation of programs that use concurrency libs,
>  native ops or `IO`.
>
> --
> Jason Dusek
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