[Haskell-cafe] Google Summer of Code idea of project & application

[Chris Smith]

Damien Desfontaines <ddfontaines at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for your answer. I must admit that I do not really realize how much work
> such a project represents. I will probably need the help of someone who is more
> experienced than me to decide my timeline, and perhaps to restrict the final
> goal of my work (perhaps to a syntaxic subset of Haskell ?).

I'll be a bit blunt, in the interest of encouraging you to be
realistic before going too far down a doomed path.  I can't imagine
anyone at all thinking that a translator from a toy subset of Haskell
into a different language would be useful in any way whatsoever.  The
goal of GSoC is to find a well-defined project that's reasonable for a
summer, and is USEFUL to a language community.  Restricting the
project to some syntactic subset of Haskell is what people are
*afraid* will happen, and why you've gotten some not entirely
enthusiastic answers.  It just won't do us any good, especially when
there's no visible community of people ready to pick up the slack and
finish the project later.

One possible way out of this trap would be if, perhaps, the variant of
Haskell you picked were actually GHC's core language.  That could
actually have a lot of advantages, such as avoid parsing entirely,
removing type classes, laziness (I think... GHC did make the swap to
strict core, didn't it?), and many other advanced type system features
entirely, and being at least a potentially useful result that works
with arbitrary code and all commonly used Haskell language extensions
on top of the entire language.  At least you are back into plausible
territory.

It still seems far too ambitious for GSoC, though.  And I remain
unconvinced how useful it really is likely to be.  I'll grant there
are other people that care a lot more about ML than I do.

-- 
Chris Smith