Claus Reinke writes:
>
> However, I don't want to sidestep the JNI issue (Kaffe now supports
> JNI). If this is to make any sense, the Java folks have to agree on
> some standard foreign language interface. Calling the native libraries
> used by the JVMs directly is even less standardized (even systems that
> support JNI are not forced to use it when they call native methods) and
> therefore hardly portable..
>
If I've understood the intended division of labour between Haskell and
Java code correctly, what you really want is a standardised 'JNI for
Haskell', allowing you to use Haskell from Java, which I think is
going to be the common case, and not the other way around.
As part of H/Direct, we're going to support something similar to JNI
for the new Hugs/GHC system, see
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/fp/software/hdirect
for info on the basic FFI. Complementary to the FFI, is work on 'a
Haskell server', i.e., a standardised Hugs & GHC interface for
querying/accessing JNI-like information from a running RTS, see
http://haskell.org/active/hserver.html
This document expresses the interface in terms of a bunch of COM
interfaces, but that's just one way of packaging up the provided API.
--Sigbjorn
