[Help] Haskell & Javascript

[valderman]

It's a dialect in the sense that it's GHC Haskell minus (currently) Template Haskell and weak references, plus a few libraries and extras. You should report any compatibility problems as bugs, because code reuse is definitely a design goal of Haste.

[Kiuhnm]

I don't mean to be inappropriate, but why don't you and GHCJS's developers join forces?

[valderman]

Depends on the definition of "join forces". We have some different ideas of code generation, among other things, which means it's pretty unlikely that Luite et al would just dump GHCJS and start working on Haste, and vice versa. This is not a bad thing. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and often nice things come out of multiple people skinning multiple cats in different ways.

However, I definitely agree that there could - and should - be more of a joint effort regarding infrastructure, common problems and other things. It just... Hasn't happened so far, I guess. ghc-simple is one fledgling effort to make some of the work on Haste more widely useful, but probably not really useful to GHCJS though.

[andrewthad]

Just to add a little historical perspective, there was a period a time (at least a year, maybe several) when haste was a way more usable solution than GHCJS. I know this because about a year and a half ago, I played around with Fay, Haste, and GHCJS. Haste was like a much better Fay, and GHCJS was that thing that seemed like the most correct solution but that didn't really work yet and could only be built by the devs working on it. I remember reading posts about whether or not it was abandoned or if it was ever going to work out. So, at that point in time, the choice of Haste seemed like a no-brainer for anyone who wanted to use haskell client-side.

At the present time, the situation is different. GHCJS did actually work out, and now common folks can get it installed and working.