A few Questions ...

[Peter Tanski]

On Oct 30, 2006, at 5:24 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

> There are several bits of ".net" code in GHC.  The ILX route is
> definitely dead at the moment, and as you say I removed it.

I noticed you removed ILX from the Storage Manager the other day.   
Good job :)

> But in
> principle being able to "foreign import" a .net procedure is a  
> different
> matter, not necessarily tied up with ILX.  However I don't think  
> that it
> is working either, though Sigbjorn did some work on it a year or two
> ago.  Sadly, the whole .net thing remains orphaned in GHC, with no one
> to love and look after it.

That really is too bad.  As a bonus, .net interoperability would be  
immediately portable to Mono.  Since I know little to nothing  
about .net and C# that would seem to be another learning-project  
someone with more knowledge could complete much faster.  I will try  
to stay away from any foreign dotnet code or its dependencies for now  
since starting that project up again would be much less intimidating  
with a rough draft at hand.

A closely related task would be making GHC "Windows-native," or at  
least able to use other Windows C compilers, especially Microsoft's  
CL which would have much better support for interoperating between  
unmanaged C code and the CLR: here I am referring to using the /clr  
switch on any wrappers for calls from .net (managed) code.  I can at  
least help with porting GHC to use a different C compiler.

Cheers,
Pete