[Haskell-cafe] State of play with Haskell-Cocoa (Objective-C)bindings?

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Luke Evans <luke at eversosoft.com>,
> I'm planning to start an Objective-C/Cocoa project and would like to
> write it in Haskell as much as possible.
>
> Of course, I can contrive to split the project into app logic (Haskell)
> and UI (Objective-C) with some sort of minimal interface between them;
> possibly just plain old C FFI.
>
> However, I would like an interface that's as 'automatic' as possible -
> one that preferably means that I don't have to spend a lot of time
> maintaining a somewhat heavy-weight special interface layer as I grow
> my code on both sides of the divide.
> Preferably the suture line is as far over on the Objective-C side as
> possible, so that I can write pretty much everything in Haskell.
>
> Now, I see a couple of references to some options:
> - HOC seems very close to what I'm looking for, but the project looks
> pretty 'dormant'.
> - I see some mention of an Objective-C FFI, but am uncertain if this
> is in any current build of GHC.
>
> Are there any other options up anyone's sleeves?  Anybody working on
> something interesting I could play with?

You've probably seen this already and it didn't qualify as
"something interesting", but http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Using_Haskell_in_an_Xcode_Cocoa_project
still works as of MacOS 10.6 and GHC 7.0.3.  No extra libraries or
tools needed - you just wrangle your Haskell .o files and all the
attendant Haskell libraries into the Xcode project, give Interface
Builder Objective C stubs to work with, and call out to Haskell
with C FFI.  I have done only one program this way, with a very simple 
interface, not enough to have any real idea how painful it's going to be.
(Actually it didn't work with -threaded, and because GHC doesn't do
the linking I couldn't figure out how to exercise the new option to
allow +RTS options, but it seems to be fine without -threaded.)

> Until recently, I was concerned about being able to use GC on the
> Objective-C side, but with Apple's new ARC memory management model,
> that's no longer an issue. 
> Most Haskell-ObjC bindings that already exist are surely designed
> for Retain-Release, which I assume is not disrupted by ARC as this
> is just RR at runtime.

I don't know - I'm using standard (C) FFI out of the box, and both
languages must support foreign C libraries that manage their own
memory, so I perhaps erroneously have not been worrying about it.

	Donn