[Fwd: F#]

Don Syme dsyme@microsoft.com
Thu, 30 May 2002 07:04:12 -0700


Hi Paul,

The attached message doesn't give the link you might be after, which is
http://research.microsoft.com/projects/fsharp.  You might also be
interested in SML.NET.

Re Haskell.NET... We (OK, basically just me) got a fair amount of the
way through a .NET backend for GHC, including a fully working compiler,
but we got sidetracked into implementation issues that weren't related
what we wanted to achieve in the first instance.  In particular, (a) GHC
is a complex beast, (b) you have to decide what to do about the
libraries and (c) I wanted a much "lighter" end system than GHC was
going to provide.  Given the general complexity of GHC, the longish
compile times and the reliance of the GHC library implementation on C
and C libraries in so many places I decided to implement a simpler
language from scratch.  I like the idea that a .NET compiler should be
under 10K lines of code if at all possible, as is the case for F#.

Those of us at MSR have no particular plans to push further on
Haskell.NET right now, but I know a number of other people have talked
about taking a crack at it.

Best wishes,
Don Syme
MSR Cambridge


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Hudak [mailto:paul.hudak@yale.edu]=20
Sent: 30 May 2002 14:12
To: haskell@cs.yale.edu
Subject: [Fwd: F#]

Hey Simon et al at Micro$oft, when will there be an H#?
(Ok, I'll settle for Haskell.NET :-)

  -Paul