[Haskell-cafe] Haskell -> .NET

[Peter Verswyvelen]

Yes, but interop only touches the surface of what is possible.

When a Haskell compiler could create IL code, it would be possible to
use the generated code inside a sandbox, e.g. to be used on the web as
loadable Silverlight code.

Of course the same could be said about other virtual machines, such as
Flash or Java, but I don't know about the tail call issue here.

I guess for now F# would be the best option, but it would be awesome
if Haskell compilers could have more backends.

I realize this is a very big undertaking, and has been mentioned
before, but it doesn't hurt to refresh the cache lines once in a
while, so maybe some bright student picks this up and hacks together
something cool during the summer :)

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 4:03 PM, Paul Sujkov <psujkov at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> it seems that this question has been already raised before:
>
> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2005-January/008244.html
>
> and there are some .Net interop implementations on the net (it is a question
> how mature they are, however):
>
> http://php.cin.ufpe.br/~haskell/haskelldotnet/
> http://haskell.forkio.com/dotnet/
>
> 2009/9/16 Peter Verswyvelen <bugfact at gmail.com>
>>
>> I heard that compiling Haskell to Java is not obvious since tail calls
>> are not supported.
>>
>> .NET's intermediate language (IL) does support tail calls, however it
>> is currently slower than regular calls, and is not always supported by
>> all JITs.
>>
>> But given that F# will soon be officially released, I hope that
>> eventually tail calls will work as expected, and fast
>>
>> See e.g.
>> http://blogs.msdn.com/clrcodegeneration/archive/2009/05/11/tail-call-improvements-in-net-framework-4.aspx
>>
>> So, might it be worth considering a .NET backend for a Haskell compiler?
>>
>> Peter Verswyvelen
>> _______________________________________________
>> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
>> Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>
>
>
> --
> Regards, Paul Sujkov
>