My appologies for this message, but I do not
currently belong to any Haskell mailing list and I have
a request to make to the Haskell development community.
I would like to find a Haskell translator/compiler whose output
is either Java source code or Java class files.
This would be a good thing in and of itself - Haskell could run
anywhere (Of course Haskell's GUI interface would have to be
based upon Java's AWT classes). It would also be useful
for the Haskell2Java converter to allow one to interface to
"native" Java code (maybe with non-side-effect Java code if
such things exist). In addition with Java as the target, Haskell
applications could to be distributed. Work would have to be
done to current Haskell compilers so that the ease in
building a distributed Haskell program is minimized.
Some observations:
1) Functional programming languages that have no side effects
offer the possibility of auto-magically parallelizing an
application.
2) The internet is the biggest and most powerfull parallel processing
machine in existence - there are millions of CPUs connected to
the web, just about all of them can execute Java, and most of the
time the machines are idle.
3) Running foreign Java code on ones machine can be safe, i.e.,
your local environment will not be disturbed.
4) Internet broker sites could be created allowing one to register
interest in selling CPU time on your machine (at night)
to anyone on the Web at some exchange rate, and others,
with electronic cash, could buy time and run their distributed
applications using your machine.
5) Massively parallel distributed programs could be run utilizing
machines on the Internet (or maybe just on local intra-net).
Not all applications can make use of this distributed system; it requires
application components to be loosely coupled with little or no shared
data for otherwise network bandwidth will negate the gains of distributing
the application. An easy means of checkpointing the remote jobs would
also be useful.
Anyway, the first step is the Haskell2Java compiler. There exists Haskell to
C translators and C to Java translators but I am interested in a rather
more highly tuned compilations process which can evolve to add support for
parallelization and distribution.
Thanks for your time.
Richard Emberson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
