[web-devel] richer client experiences

[Drew Haven]

I've been toying with the idea of compiling Haskell, or at least a
subset there-of into JavaScript.  It's an interesting technical
problem, and has lead to some fun coding.  The idea is basically that
for each Haskell syntax construct, an equivalent construct can be
created in JavaScript, though perhaps in many more words.  Then of
course there is the need to support a mapping for the Prelude and a
library to access JavaScript functionality like DOM traversal in the
browser.

I'm not sure if there any major technical barriers.  What I see as
being dangerous is performance, as Haskell is not designed to be
JavaScript and the JavaScript I've produced so far is very wordy
compared to hand-written JavaScript, but I haven't delved into
performance issues yet.  I also haven't bothered trying to interface
with external Javascript.

The benefits would be that you get all the terseness and compile-time
checks of Haskell, which would eliminate some of the headaches I have
with JavaScript.  Right now though, I'm not going to have time to
finish to use it on my next project, so it has fallen to the wayside.

Would something like this be valuable?  Are there any major
limitations I've overlooked?

Drew Haven