[Haskell-cafe] Re: Opinion about JHC

[John Meacham]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 10:44:22PM -0500, Braden Shepherdson wrote:
> The only annoying part was having to build with jhc outside the  
> scratchbox environment and then build the C output inside the  
> scratchbox. This is necessary because jhc is not self-hosting and I  
> couldn't get GHC to build for Maemo.

Would you really want to have to run jhc _on_ your nokia 770 (or
whatever) just to compile Haskell programs for it? The need for
self-hosting in other compilers has always seemed like a deficiency in
their design, a compiler is just a pure function from source code to
output for a specified architecture. Said function is pure, it should
not depend on what platform the compiler happens to be running on any
more than any other pure function.

Not that having jhc run on the nokia would be a bad thing, but it should
not be required or provide any particular advantage for compiling
programs for the nokia. jhc running on your N800 should be able to
compile windows programs just as easily as jhc running on a windows
machine itself or a linux box or a mac box.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ - http://notanumber.net/