[Haskell-cafe] Re: Libraries for Commercial Users

[Brad Larsen]

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 5:11 PM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> brad.larsen:
>> John,
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 3:20 PM, John A. De Goes <john at n-brain.net> wrote:
>> [...]
>> > JVM is cross-platform, and contains sufficient typing information to
>> > permit one to write something like, "import foreign jvm
>> > java.list.Collection", and have typed access to the whole class and all of
>> > its methods.
>> [...]
>>
>> Having painless Haskell <- Java interoperability would be great.  I'm
>> curious though:  could it really be so simple as a one-line ``import
>> foreign jvm'' directive?  I imagine the purity mismatch between
>> Haskell and Java would be very troublesome.
>
> No more so than C, surely. We're used to stateful APIs. They're a pain.
[...]

The use of foreign C libraries in Haskell is typically done through
definition of lots of boilerplate code, putting a safe, workable
Haskell veneer over the library.  Right?

I got the impression (perhaps wrongly) that John was suggesting a
simple one-line ``import foreign jvm LIBRARY'' directive to let you
use LIBRARY without writing all that boilerplate.  Which would be very
convenient, but is rather different than the situation with C
libraries.

Sincerely,
Brad