[Haskell-cafe] GHC for mobile devices?

[Casey Basichis]

Hi Kris,

No offense taken, it was an argument that works to shut down
constructive discussion of how to get Haskell running on mobile, a task
which has perplexed me for several long days.  I agree most apps are pretty
terrible, at least on iOS though, despite the percentages being wildly off
there are still a few hundred apps that are very well done and thoughtful,
none of them using Haskell I'm sure.

I'm looking to pass Haskell lists of musical data and return processed
musical ideas from it (not audio, not realtime).  I was also planning on
handling a database within Haskell as the information contained would be
used by the music processing and from what I have read Haskell interfaces
to SQL far more readily than with a C++ orm type solution.  I was planning
on working with Haskells Euterpea as base to build my ideas off of, my I
might end up rolling my own similar library as my aims are a bit different
than theirs.

Everything else would be C++, including the interface, audio and dsp
processing etc.   I already have the C++ stuff running on my phone.  I have
read about the difficulty of getting Haskell working in real world
scenarios, but as far as I understand my plans for it are fairly well
suited to it.

Since much of the documentation online about Haskell seems to be out of
date, its tough to get a general feel for whats working.  I see people
mention that cross-compilation was finished a while back which should allow
for targeting arm but nothing concrete and the website gives conflicting
info.  I've also considered using GHC to generate C to paste into the
project but it seems there have been and may be more integrated ways to get
it running.

casey


On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 9:31 AM, Kristopher Micinski <krismicinski at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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
>



-- 
Casey James Basichis
Composer - Cartoon Network
http://www.caseyjamesbasichis.com
caseybasichis at gmail.com
310.387.7540
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