[Haskell-cafe] Hugs

[Giacomo Tesio]

2016-04-20 19:52 GMT+02:00 Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info>:

> On 04/20/2016 08:06 PM, Giacomo Tesio wrote:
> > 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.
>

No contradiction, you are just misreading the statement: P. Jones proved
that for Haskell98. For Haskell2010, it's still to be proved.


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

Maybe.
But, as always in engineering, it's a matter of economics.

> 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.
>

Sure, give me an estimate of the cost! I will seriously evaluate the
investment.

The requirements of the update are:
- support Haskell2010 without any extension
- simple and portable C code, possibly C99 but at least GCC
- statically linked (possibly newlib, but I can replace the libc later)

Actually to evaluate the RoI I need some statistics about the Hackage
packages that such renewed Hugs would be able to run:
- how many packages in Hackage are currently maintained? how many of them
did exist 2 years ago? how many packages were maintained 2 years ago?
- how many maintained packages conform to Haskell2010 without using any
extension?
- how many maintained packages use FFI (requiring libraries that should be
linked with Hugs too)?
- could such interpreter run cabal?


Giacomo
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