[Haskell-cafe] Re: Opinion about JHC

[Braden Shepherdson]

John Meacham wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 10:44:22PM -0500, Braden Shepherdson wrote:
>> The only annoying part was having to build with jhc outside the  
>> scratchbox environment and then build the C output inside the  
>> scratchbox. This is necessary because jhc is not self-hosting and I  
>> couldn't get GHC to build for Maemo.
> 
> Would you really want to have to run jhc _on_ your nokia 770 (or
> whatever) just to compile Haskell programs for it? The need for
> self-hosting in other compilers has always seemed like a deficiency in
> their design, a compiler is just a pure function from source code to
> output for a specified architecture. Said function is pure, it should
> not depend on what platform the compiler happens to be running on any
> more than any other pure function.
> 
> Not that having jhc run on the nokia would be a bad thing, but it should
> not be required or provide any particular advantage for compiling
> programs for the nokia. jhc running on your N800 should be able to
> compile windows programs just as easily as jhc running on a windows
> machine itself or a linux box or a mac box.
> 
>         John
> 


It's not so much wanting to run it on the device (though that would be 
fun just for the hack value). I was just saying that it adds an annoying 
step to building using JHC, since you have to run JHC on the host, and 
then gcc inside the scratchbox. It's not a limitation, just makes it 
hard to write a working Makefile.

I was just playing around with it, so that never mattered much. I 
suppose one could have two Makefiles in a proper project.


Braden Shepherdson
shepheb