[Haskell-cafe] Re: Libraries for Commercial Users

[wren ng thornton]

Patrick LeBoutillier wrote:
> Don,
> 
>>> 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.
>>
>>
>>> With this hypothetical ``import foreign jvm'' mechanism, what would
>>> the be type of imported Java stuff?  Would it all be done in IO?
>>>
>>> The more I think about it, the trickier it seems.  Beside the purity
>>> mismatch of Haskell and Java, there is an OO/functional mismatch.
>> That's more of an issue. But the prior work has been done.
> 
> Do you have any references to this work?


It was a major research topic about a decade ago, though the projects 
have died since. And the topic comes up about every 4 months on the 
Cafe, so I'd recommend sifting through the archives. I know last time it 
came up (or the time before?) I gave a rather extensive list of 
projects. And the wiki[1] still lists a few of them.

The last time this discussion came up people got involved enough to 
revive LambdaVM[2], which was one of the more mature options back in the 
day. If you're interested in the topic, I suggest getting in touch with 
the author and helping out.

On the topic of automatically embedding OO-style languages into Haskell, 
you should also check out hprotoc[3]. It's a package for Google's 
protocol buffers, which are ostensibly language agnostic but actually 
assume a (weakly) OO language. The hprotoc library will create a family 
of virtual modules based on the protocol spec and makes a pretty nice 
interface out of them.


[1] 
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_libraries/Interfacing_other_languages
[2] http://wiki.brianweb.net/LambdaVM/LambdaVM
[3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hprotoc

-- 
Live well,
~wren