[Haskell-cafe] What is simplest extension language to implement?

[Malcolm Wallace]

On 4 Nov 2010, at 17:52, Luke Palmer wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 5:30 AM, Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at me.com 
> > wrote:
>>> ehm. I missed something and ghc api is well documented and stable ?
>>
>> There are other ways of adding Haskell as a scripting language -  
>> bundling
>> ghc is not necessary.
>
> Do tell.

Well, our solution is not entirely off-the-shelf, and possibly not to  
everyone's taste or ability, but we wrote our own Haskell "compiler",  
and a bunch of auto-generation tools (and FFI magic) that expose the  
underlying application's APIs (written in both Haskell and C++) as  
import-able modules into the scripting-Haskell layer.

When I say "we", of course I mean Lennart, who may have some previous  
experience in writing Haskell compilers...

But this one is based on many freely available packages like haskell- 
src-exts and uniplate, so lots of the hard work had already been done  
for us.  And who knows, perhaps one day enough of the other parts of a  
basic compiler (name resolver, type checker, translator to core) might  
appear in Hackage to make it easy for anyone to write their own  
scripting engine.

Regards,
     Malcolm