[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hugs on iPhone

[Braden Shepherdson]

Miguel Mitrofanov wrote:
> 3) Personally, I'd love to see ghc on iPhone. It could even persuade me 
> to upgrade.

See the GHC-on-ARM page[1] for my work on it last summer, among others'. 
GHC is tough to port because bootstrapping to new architectures has been 
broken for a long time, since soon after 6.6.2. My attempts to 
cross-compile 6.6.1 using the development environment for my Nokia N810 
failed, as can be seen in [1].

I attempted several times to build Hugs for it: it would build 
successfully and then fail to run either on the device, in scratchbox, 
or natively compiled on x86 because it failed to find the Prelude. I 
suspect I was doing something wrong in building Hugs, something 
unrelated to the ARM platform.

The good news is that jhc's portable C code works perfectly well -- but 
of course that is simply running precompiled Haskell apps and not a 
compiler or interpreter running on the device. Since jhc is not 
self-hosting (yet?) but instead is built with GHC, that's the best we 
can do with that approach for now.


Braden Shepherdson
shepheb

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ArmLinuxGhc