[Haskell-cafe] GHC for mobile devices?

[Andrew Pennebaker]

I've tried porting GHC to Haiku OS, a Unix-like desktop OS, but the state
of the GHC build system is fairly confusing. The build scripts contain a
Perl script with a bad shebang, and you can't build GHC without already
having a working older version.

If someone can point me to the most recent GHC code that doesn't need
itself to compile, I can work on a Haiku version as practice. I really want
GHC for every possible system.
On Nov 10, 2012 5:49 PM, "Kristopher Micinski" <krismicinski at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Casey Basichis <caseybasichis at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 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.
> >
>
> Yup!  Most of the time apps are merely "translated" versions of rails
> frontends.  (For better or for worse, I assume that if we were to port
> haskell to work with Android really it would be mostly to appease my
> purity.)
>
> > 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.
> >
>
> I'm not sure I understand completely, but I agree this isn't a bad idea.
>
> > 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.
> >
>
> I don't disagree!
>
> > 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.
>
> I am venturing into my embarrassing lack of knowledge about GHC
> internals here, but how easily would the run time system work on
> Android..?  I had assumed a large part of the effort into getting
> OCaml to work on iPhone went into the runtime system, no?
>
> If you're (Andrew or anyone) still interested in pursuing this I would
> be interested in helping out, I have some Android internals knowledge
> and would be glad to lend a hand.
>
> One major thing that seems to be necessary is congealing all the
> (mis/outdated)information into the wiki article on haskell.org.
>
> kris
>
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