[Haskell-cafe] GHC for mobile devices?

[Kristopher Micinski]

Yes, I've seen some of the work done on this and I think he's also
looked into OCaml on Android.

To be completely honest it's not really the language that's such the
barrier: the hard truth is that any Android app doing anything of
interest is necessarily going to be using the Android framework.
Android programming (at least, presubaly iOS too) is not a lot of
advanced construction, it's mostly dumb apps acting as web frontends,
I'd posit that this is probably why people have been mostly content
with the Android API for so long anyway.

So the main barrier is being able to interface with the Java side of
things (obviously) in a way that doesn't completely kill perf either
(this sounds nontrivial...).  Then you need to give a sane
reimplementation of the Android API within Haskell.

kris

On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 12:59 AM, Mike Ledger <eleventynine at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would be so very happy to be able to program Haskell Android programs. I
> think the steps we'd need are to 1. Port GHC to ARM (done already?) and 2.
> Create a JVM calling convention for GHC (using JNI? I have no idea). Short
> of actually making a new calling convention for the JVM, maybe we could use
> the JNI to create a thin C wrapper that has the code we want to import
> normally.
>
> Unfortunately I have no idea of where to start and very little experience
> with Android other than firing up Eclipse, playing around with simple
> applications and being very dissatisfied.
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 4:32 PM, Andrew Pennebaker
> <andrew.pennebaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Awesome! Jeffrey Scofield has ported OCaml to iOS, so there's also
>> experience there.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 11:46 PM, Kristopher Micinski
>> <krismicinski at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> If you have interest in doing this, I have quite a bit of experience
>>> in Android hacking at the system level and above and would be glad to
>>> talk about what might need to happen.  (Though I don't know the GHC
>>> internals / toolchain so well.)
>>>
>>> One potential choice is Scala, though from my limited experience
>>> that's a very rough imitation of the uses for Haskell.  (Though,
>>> obviously it works mostly out of the box because of the JVM compiler
>>> target..)
>>>
>>> http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Android
>>>
>>> I've been writing up some thoughts on the Android activity lifecycle
>>> already interpreted with respect to FP, apps are quite functional
>>> already for a variety of reasons.
>>>
>>> kris
>>>
>>> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Andrew Pennebaker
>>> <andrew.pennebaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > I'd love to use Haskell directly for making mobiles apps. How can we
>>> > make
>>> > this happen, porting GHC to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone?
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > Cheers,
>>> >
>>> > Andrew Pennebaker
>>> > www.yellosoft.us
>>> >
>>> > _______________________________________________
>>> > Haskell-Cafe mailing list
>>> > Haskell-Cafe at haskell.org
>>> > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
>>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Andrew Pennebaker
>> www.yellosoft.us
>>
>>
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