[Haskell-cafe] A language that runs on the JVM or .NET has the advantage of Oracle & Microsoft making those layers more parallelizable.

[Paul R]

KC> Are there plans a foot (or under fingers) to make a version of
KC> Haskell that runs on the JVM?

This is probably a fun - or even useful - project, and a lot of people
have had this wish of a general convergence of language runtimes toward
a single VM such as the java one or the .net one.

But I really hope this will never become an official GHC target, with
any kind of commitment to support it. The Haskell/GHC tandem is based on
concepts that are decades ahead of what is supported in mainstreams VMs,
or even what will be supported in the next decade (see the changelog of
the lastest Java release for fun). I don't know if it still current, but
the Scala crew made considerable effort to support limited tail call
optimization, because the JVM couldn't provide support for it. That
shows how hard basic functionnal concepts don't map well on the JVM.

I think nobody wants Haskell/GHC momentum to be slowed down by
supporting limited backends. Neither we want Haskell-on-JVM benchmarks
to show up everywhere on the web as "haskell benchmarks" (figures would
probably be bad, because some basic optimizations or cost-model choices
can't be applied to the JVM). Neither we want the web to be filled with
Haskell-On-Java(|.Net) code snippets starting with Java-(|.Net)-specific
imports at the top of the file.

Haskell and GHC are amazing projects that make me like my job and have
great hopes for the future of computer engineering ! :)


-- 
  Paul