[Haskell-cafe] Status of Haskell + Mac + GUIs & graphics

[wren ng thornton]

On 5/18/11 10:54 PM, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
> Nevertheless, there are good reasons to develop native applications (especially on the Mac with its user-base spoiled by high-end UX).  Luckily, the choice of toolkit is trivial in this case.  For Mac OS, we need a Haskell-Cocoa binding.  I don't think there are any serious technical obstacles to develop one.  Somebody would just have to spend the time and effort to write one.

Well, there may be some non-trivial technical work in figuring out how 
to do good Haskell-like high-level bindings, rather than low-level 
bindings that shove everything into IO. Also, ensuring type safety 
across the border is extremely non-trivial, especially because Objective 
C's object system is on the untyped/Smalltalk end of things. It's 
possible to just treat their types like they do, but I'm sure many 
Haskellers would prefer to make the typing more explicit and checkable 
(so long as it's still usable).

But yes, the mere process of making bindings isn't especially 
cumbersome. Anyone interested in prior art should take a look at the 
Perl--ObjectiveC bridgework, CamelBones:

     http://camelbones.sourceforge.net/

-- 
Live well,
~wren