Patrick LeBoutillier wrote:
Don,
Having painless Haskell <- Java interoperability would be great. I'm
curious though: could it really be so simple as a one-line ``import
foreign jvm'' directive? I imagine the purity mismatch between
Haskell and Java would be very troublesome.
No more so than C, surely. We're used to stateful APIs. They're a pain.
With this hypothetical ``import foreign jvm'' mechanism, what would
the be type of imported Java stuff? Would it all be done in IO?
The more I think about it, the trickier it seems. Beside the purity
mismatch of Haskell and Java, there is an OO/functional mismatch.
That's more of an issue. But the prior work has been done.
Do you have any references to this work?
It was a major research topic about a decade ago, though the projects
have died since. And the topic comes up about every 4 months on the
Cafe, so I'd recommend sifting through the archives. I know last time it
came up (or the time before?) I gave a rather extensive list of
projects. And the wiki[1] still lists a few of them.
The last time this discussion came up people got involved enough to
revive LambdaVM[2], which was one of the more mature options back in the
day. If you're interested in the topic, I suggest getting in touch with
the author and helping out.
On the topic of automatically embedding OO-style languages into Haskell,
you should also check out hprotoc[3]. It's a package for Google's
protocol buffers, which are ostensibly language agnostic but actually
assume a (weakly) OO language. The hprotoc library will create a family
of virtual modules based on the protocol spec and makes a pretty nice
interface out of them.
[1]
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_libraries/Interfacing_other_languages
[2] http://wiki.brianweb.net/LambdaVM/LambdaVM
[3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hprotoc
--
Live well,
~wren
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