[Haskell-cafe] Haskell on JVM

[wren ng thornton]

Claus Reinke wrote:
> |Basically, the JVM lacks a native ability to do tail calls. It does  
> |not have an instruction to remove/replace a stack frame without 
> |executing an actual return to the calling method/function.
> 
> There is a conflict between preserving stack layout and efficient
> tail calls. Unfortunately, stack inspection appears to be used for
> security aspects in JVM. That doesn't make tail calls impossible,
> but may have slowed down progress as this argument always
> comes up in discussing tail calls on the JVM (since its byte code
> isn't just an internal detail, but an externally used API).

It's a bugbear, but it's not impossible:

     http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/esop2003-cf.pdf

     http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/cf-toplas04.pdf

Maybe one day it'll be here.

-- 
Live well,
~wren