[Yhc] Suitability of yhc for handheld Haskell

[Tony Sloane]

Hi all,

We at Macquarie Uni have been working for some time on handheld  
implementations of Haskell.  Our most recent efforts have focused on  
nhc98 and we have a "mostly working" version of the nhc98 runtime for  
Palm OS.  Our aim is to provide a testbed for DSL-based specification  
of handheld applications.

I am excited by the potential that yhc offers for making handheld  
Haskell easier to build and work with.  yhc seems to offer a great  
deal for our project (e.g., portability, cross platform bytecode,  
less/no reliance on C linker).

So, my question to you is: Would you advise active use of the yhc  
code as a basis for our handheld work?  Is it stable enough to be  
useful for this at this point?  We can probably put up with  
deficiencies at the compiler end since we don't expect to write very  
large or complex programs in the near future but we need the runtime  
to be stable so we can be sure of the port.  Or should we wait?  Any  
other comments?

I'm hoping that it is stable enough since we want to get quite a bit  
of work done over the (Southern Hemisphere) summer.

Cheers,
Tony Sloane

Dept of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney