[Haskell-cafe] Haskell on JVM

[Jason Dagit]

Hi Timo,

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 5:09 AM, Timo B. Hübel <t.h at gmx.info> wrote:

> > Incidentally, I am looking for someone well versed in the JVM who wants
> > to help spearhead a JVM back end for jhc.
>
> I would love to see this! With the current advent of all those languages
> targeting at the JVM (Groovy, Scala, Clojure) I think a JVM backend for a
> Haskell compiler could, together with proper Java interop, make for a major
> breakthrough of Haskell in general.
>
> Unforunately, as I can tell from my halfknowledge, the JVM lacks some
> important functionality required for properly targeting functional language
> features on the JVM.
>
> And here comes my question: If there is anybody with proper knowledge about
> this issue, I would really like to know what are those things that are
> missing? For example, Clojure lacks proper tail recrusion optimization due
> to
> some missing functionality in the JVM. But does anybody know the details?


My brief research into why the JVM lacks tail calls indicated that tail
calls do not play nicely with the JVM security model and make stack traces
harder to manage.  Although, I have also heard that tail call of some form
is expected to appear in java 1.7.

Jason
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