UHC-like JavaScript backend in GHC

Christopher Done chrisdone at gmail.com
Tue Nov 13 19:18:19 CET 2012


On 13 November 2012 16:33, J. Stutterheim <j.stutterheim at me.com> wrote:
> Yes, I did check out other work that's been done in this area, albeit only briefly. Unless I've overlooked it (which is very much possible), none of the other solutions (except Fay) support an FFI that bridges the gap between JS's OO and the functional world, like our JS-like language in the foreign imports. In real-life situations, where you want to get rid of writing JS entirely, but still might want to use existing JS libraries such as jQuery, this feature is essential.

Just a small point, but Fay's FFI differs from UHC/GHC's in that it
natively supports String/Double and functions without needing wrappers
and conversions from CString or whatnot. E.g. you write

addClassWith :: (Double -> String -> Fay String) -> JQuery -> Fay JQuery
addClassWith = ffi "%2.addClass(%1)"

and you're already ready to use it. If I recall in UHC last I tried, I
had to do some serializing/unserializing for the string types, and
make a wrapper function for the callback. Whether it makes any sense
for a UHC/GHC-backend to behave like this, I don't know. But people
really like it.



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