[Haskell-cafe] Hugs

[Roman Cheplyaka]

On 04/20/2016 08:06 PM, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
> 2016-04-13 17:51 GMT+02:00 David Feuer <david.feuer at gmail.com
> <mailto:david.feuer at gmail.com>>:
> 
>     Yes, this is all a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I really do think that
>     pointing students to an unmaintained language implementation
>     (regardless of the pedagogical reasons) has negative consequences
>     for the functional programming community as a whole.
> 
> 
> Today I was looking for a simplified version of Haskell that could
> compete in size with Lua or Wren.
> Nothing exist.
> 
> I thought: oh... but what about Hugs98? Not Lua sized, but still better
> than GHC!
> Let see the age of the last related mail in haskell-cafe... you can't
> imagine my surprise reading this thread!
> 
> GHC *is* too complex for a wide variety of use case.
> Porting Hugs to an new operative system used to be approachable for a
> single programmer, GHC have never been.
> 
> Is this a language issue?
> I don't think so... but apparently, despite the abundance of language
> hackers in the Haskell community, nobody still tried to prove that an
> interpreter for the core Haskell language can be written in a reasonable
> amount of C code.

You are contradicting yourself. Mark P Jones and other "language
hackers" who contributed to Hugs have already proven that.

That no-one seems to be willing to maintain Hugs may indicate that there
aren't as many use cases as you claim.

> Thus, to my money (and admittedly for my own use cases), if somebody
> renew the interest around a simpler Haskell implementation, he's going
> to have a really *positive *effect.

Would you put your money where your mouth is? I'm sure you would find
someone who could maintain and improve Hugs for you.

Roman