GHCJS is Amazing
Image Attribution:
Rimu Shuang. "Untitled Photo". Jan 4, 2015. Under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License. Symbols generated by LaTeX snippet from Gerold Meisinger. "Pretty printing Haskell code in Latex".
January 4, 2015
haskell
Over the weekend I finally decided to take the jump and install the 2014 Haskell Platform on my Debian system. I had been waiting for it to get into the repos, but I was tired of waiting and decided to download the binaries myself. This gave me the wonderful opportunity to install GHCJS and try it out.
It’s absolutely amazing. Luite Stegeman and everyone else who worked on GHCJS
thank you! It was a bit of a pain to get it installed (although apparently it is
miles better now than it was previously), but the main point is that all Haskell
code that GHC can compile compiles with GHCJS. When I first did the simple main = putStrLn "Hello World!" I felt that it was kind of cool, as it always is when
compiling to a new target or trying out a new language. Then I took an existing
Haskell project, made no adjustments to it whatsoever and hit cabal install.
It worked perfectly. No hitches no nothing. Just install and blam! it was done.
There was definitely a performance hit (my executables were usually running about 50x slower) and the generated JS files were pretty large (although the GHCJS wiki’s advice to use Google’s Closure Compiler definitely helps cut down on size), but the magic was that I needed to change absolutely nothing.
So this short post is a long-winded way of saying if you like Haskell, try GHCJS and it will blow your mind.