[Haskell-cafe] GHC for mobile devices?

[Kristopher Micinski]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Casey Basichis <caseybasichis at gmail.com> wrote:
> As for you notion of "hard truth," and "dumb apps acting as web front ends"
> its pretty blase to assume that anyone interested in this thread will share
> that perspective in terms of their own goals on these platforms.  I compose
> professionally on my phone, its certainly not a toy for my purposes.  I also
> have no interest whatsoever in getting Cocoa commands into Haskell. I just
> want a functional way of working with data.
>

I didn't perceive my comment would be taken as insulting by people,
but I apologize if it was!  It is based on quite detailed study of why
people write apps that I've been working on for the past year or so.
The vast majority of apps are thin wrappers around REST services.  I
didn't mean to imply that this is what you would be using it for here,
but rather to give an explanation as to why Haskell may have not shown
up.

I only meant that, at some level, you are going to need to fit into
the platform, you can't deny this: for the case of Android you *have*
to hook into the lifecycle somewhere, because that's how the system
runs your app. You also probably want a GUI (maybe *you* don't, but
I'd wager most people *do*).

In any case, you can get good programming done without much platform
assistance using things like the NDK, some projects manage to do this:
mostly projects with gobs of C++ code ported from desktop to Android
where they need minimal Java sections because of fast production
cycles.

> I would greatly prefer to go the Haskell route, but  have been considering
> OCaml as well as they seem to have an active and enthused interest in iOS.
> I would love a bit of perspective on whether OCaml would be worth pursing in
> the long run for the short term benefit of having a more mature mobile
> implementation.'
>

What do you want to do with it?  From what I can tell about all the
OCaml projects I've seen, they still mostly suffer from the problems
of having a limited interface to the Android system proper.

(I'm not saying that makes them bad, just harder to use to write real apps..)

kris