[Haskell-cafe] Re: Embedded funcional programming?

[Jeffrey Scofield]

Maurí­cio CA <mauricio.antunes at gmail.com> writes:

> I've beeing working with some people who do programming for
> wireless devices. 100% of their code uses C, and I would like to
> show them nice things they could do with funcional programming
> (not necessarily Haskell. I believe, say, Standard ML could be
> also very nice.)
>
> I'm new to this, so the only problems I see are finding a compiler
> that targets the platform (ARM7, for instance, or others) and
> uploading the compiled firmware to the device.
>
> Do you think this can be a straightforward path?

With one other guy, I got OCaml working on the iPhone.  I don't
know that I'd call it straightforward, exactly.  The hardest part was
the interface to the existing libraries (Cocoa Touch).  This
included making some tweaks to the OCaml ARM back end so
that its register and calling conventions match what is used by
Apple's C and ObjC compilers.

At any rate, we were really very happy with the results until
a week or so ago when Apple apparently saw fit to forbid the
use of languages other than C, C++, and ObjC.

Your associates might have a much easier time if they're working
closer to bare metal.  If their hardware is up to it, I would really
suggest looking into it.

As a side comment, I haven't noticed any reaction in the
Haskell/iPhone community about Apple's recent policy change.

Regards,

Jeffrey Scofield
Seattle