[Haskell-cafe] Lazy language on JVM/CLR

[Marcin Kosiba]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 5:16 PM, John Meacham <john at repetae.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 10:42:26AM +1000, Tony Morris wrote:
>> I expect others have forethought and perhaps even experimented with such
>> a language. Are there any dangers to be wary of that undo the entire
>> endeavour?
>
> There have been a couple papers published on it, the main sticking point
> seems to be tail call elimination. When targeting real hardware you
> always had the option of dropping to assembly to do a direct jump, but
> there isn't an equivalent in the JVM. If you look up tail call + jvm you
> will probably get a few hits. I believe there are even a couple haskell
> specific papers on the issue.
>
I think .NET 4.0 has tail-call optimization built in because I
remember reading that F# relies on such a mechanism. AFAIK you just
need to mark the bytecode as "to be optimized" and the runtime does
that for you.