[Haskell-iPhone] Objective C bindings?

[Jake Brownson]

I did some googling on the TH issue. I was already vaguely familiar
that it was a problem in cross compliers. I'm sure I'm not pointing
out anything you guys don't already know, but just to show what I was
able to find myself. This seemed to the the most obvious information
on the topic is in this thread:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2013-June/001473.html

There seem to be a couple of self-described hacks to work around the
issue by preprocessing the TH of sorts:
http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Template_Haskell_on_impossible_architectures/
http://hackage.haskell.org/package/zeroth

>From my ~hour of googling it looks like there was hope to get a
(hacky?) TH cross compiler patch set from the GHCJS project merged in
to 7.8, and the 7.8 release notes talk about improved cross
compilation support, but I take it those patches didn't make it in?

It seems like there are several folks including yourselves pushing in
the direction of getting Haskell to run w/ nice bindings on iOS, and
the TH cross compiler problem is the biggest hurdle remaining. Is the
current thinking that we have to find a way to do it w/o proper TH, or
is there still hope that we can have it and get an incredible solution
like language-c-inline going?

Is the problem a lack of interest from the folks qualified to make
changes to GHC? It it in progress and just not making a lot of noise?
I'm not sure how the community works :)

I'm pretty seriously interested in this capability and would offer
assistance moving forward w/ it. I'm really tired of using C++ to
write apps, and have really fallen in love w/ Haskell over the past
few months. It seems like there are already a number of folks w/
longer Haskell backgrounds than myself who have tried so I'm not sure
what more I have to offer, but I offer it.

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 4:10 AM, Manuel M T Chakravarty
<chak at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> The problem with language-c-inline for iOS at the moment is that it relies on TH in a very essential way.
>
> Manuel
>
>
> Jake Brownson <jbrownson at gmail.com>:
>> Thanks for the tips guys, and thanks to Luke for his work in this area!
>>
>> I came across ObjectiveHaskell but got the idea that it was more for
>> calling HS from ObjectiveC, but I think I got the wrong idea looking
>> closer. The samples all still have a bunch of .m files in with them.
>> It'd be awesome to purely have .hs files which I believe HOC would
>> allow.
>>
>> However as I was searching for ObjectiveHaskell on hackage I came
>> across the language-inline-c project which is still in development,
>> but looks really interesting:
>> https://github.com/mchakravarty/language-c-inline/wiki/Motivation
>>
>> It uses quaiquoting to let you write objective-c or c directly inline
>> in a .hs file and it'll compile it and hook up all the values
>> automatically (or that's what I get from reading the website anyway,
>> haven't tried it yet).
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 11:25 PM, Luke Iannini <lukexipd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Yo Jake,
>>> Yeah, what Max said. Sigh, I've done this (updated OH to use Max's static
>>> lib support, fixed a bunch of bugs, and other things) an have been promising
>>> to clean it up enough to release for quite some time. The yucky bit is that
>>> I manually converted it to strip out the Template Haskell usage which both
>>> makes it much uglier and not nearly as nice to use. But it works, and that's
>>> something : ), so I'll get going.
>>>
>>> I think we could design something even nicer with Type Families sometime
>>> that didn't require TH.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Luke
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 9:27 PM, Maxwell Swadling
>>> <maxwellswadling at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hello!
>>>>
>>>> I think ObjectiveHaskell is a more practical choice today than HOC.
>>>>
>>>> ObjectiveHaskell could be cleaned up to use the new GHC 7.8 features,
>>>> which will simplify the build process.
>>>>
>>>> https://github.com/jspahrsummers/ObjectiveHaskell/tree/reboot
>>>>
>>>> Try it out.
>>>>
>>>> __END__
>>>> Maxwell Swadling
>>>>
>>>>> On 23 Apr 2014, at 11:25 am, Jake Brownson <jbrownson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://code.google.com/p/hoc/
>>>>>
>>>>> Is anybody aware of any efforts to revive the HOC project that
>>>>> provides Objective-C bindings for Haskell? Or any alternatives to it?
>>>>> It seems like it would be a great complement to the iOS cross
>>>>> compiler. I've started reading through the code to see what it might
>>>>> take to get them working w/ recent GHCs. the last commit on the google
>>>>> code project was 2010.
>>>>>
>>>>> When I do the "runhaskell Setup.hs build" from the installation
>>>>> instructions I get a few things like this:
>>>>>
>>>>> "Unacceptable argument type in foreign declaration: CInt"
>>>>>
>>>>> which seems to be explained by this as due to a change in FFI at some
>>>>> point:
>>>>> http://haskell.1045720.n5.nabble.com/zlib-build-failure-on-recent-GHC-td4971516.html
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm just starting to dig into this so maybe there's a good reason
>>>>> nobody else has. I'm pretty new to Haskell, but I love the idea of
>>>>> making native GUIs for OS X and eventually iOS.
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> iPhone mailing list
>>>>> iPhone at haskell.org
>>>>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/iphone
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> iPhone mailing list
>>>> iPhone at haskell.org
>>>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/iphone
>>>
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> iPhone at haskell.org
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>