[Haskell-cafe] Requesting Feedback: I Love Haskell, but can't find a place to use it

[Brandon Allbery]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 8:30 PM, Jonathan Geddes
<geddes.jonathan at gmail.com>wrote:

> I had hoped that compiling Haskell to C with -fvia-C (or would it be just
> -C?) would allow Haskell to run in new, uncharted territory such as Android
> (with NDK), IOS, Google's NaCl, etc. But today I learned that GHC's C
> backend has been deprecated!  Is it more difficult than I am imagining to
> get Haskell to work in these environments? Is it simply a matter of low
> interest in this kind of work? Or something more fundamental? Am I missing
> something?
>

The C backend was never suitable for that; it couldn't cross-compile and it
used some crufty Perl to apply dubious optimizations to the generated code
(and never did anything interesting on x86 anyway due to lack of
registers).  The portable ANSI C backend, which is used to port GHC to a
new platform in the absence of cross-compilation, still works — but
produces rather slow code.  The native and LLVM backends are much better,
and there is at least some potential for cross-compilation.

I believe there is work proceeding on an ARM native code generator that can
be used to target Android.

-- 
brandon s allbery                                      allbery.b at gmail.com
wandering unix systems administrator (available)     (412) 475-9364 vm/sms
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