[Haskell-cafe] Should webassembly be a target for GHC?

[Daniel Bergey]

On 2016-04-23 at 00:28, Dimitri DeFigueiredo <defigueiredo at ucdavis.edu> wrote:
> I'm interested in webassembly's recent momentum
>
> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/03/a-webassembly-milestone/
>
> Is this a way we could get a foot in the web?
> I'm curious, just putting the thought out there.

GHCJS can compile Haskell to JS already - anything that GHC compiles,
except libraries that link against non-Haskell code.  There are also
various Haskell-like languages, with which I'm less familiar.

Periodically someone asks about generating webassembly or asm.js from
GHCJS.  For example:

https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs/issues/53
https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs/issues/359

My understanding is GHCJS depends on first-class functions and
garbage collection in the JS runtime, which aren't provided by the
assembly subset.

bergey