Interesting technical achievement but what would this be used for in practical terms?
I will give a lecture about Haskell next week and might use this website for demonstration.
GHC now runs in the browser
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#22Interesting technical achievement but what would this be used for in practical terms?
I think the immediate and obvious case would be educational materials. Other than that, technical achievements need not always be practical to be cool :)
That’s one of the primary reasons we built the tooling for Q# to run in the browser (by writing in Rust and compiling to wasm). The “try with copilot” experience [1] and the “katas” for learning [2] all have a full language service and runtime in the browser.
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#23Does it use WasmGC, or bundle its own garbage collector?
[flagged]
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#24Interesting technical achievement but what would this be used for in practical terms?
In addition to the other responses, it's also worth noting that wasm itself is useful outside of the web itself; e.g. in containerized applications.
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#25Can someone please help me understand the difference between features like this and the technologies like Blazor Wasm which actually let you write frontend in non js for websites?
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#26This is very impressive. I once built an educational Haskell programming + math. + art web site (mathvas.com). Something like this would have simplified that a lot.
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#27Is it just me or is it actually impossible to type anything?
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#28Interesting technical achievement but what would this be used for in practical terms?
Have you ever used Godbolt? The Rust playground? The Typescript's playground? The Go playground? It lets you have that without the pain of hosting compilers server side.
From "WebR – R in the Browser" (2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44999706 :
> jupyterlite-xeus builds jupyterlite, Jupyter xeus kernels, and the specified dependencies to WASM with packages from conda-forge or emscripten-forge.
jupyterlite/xeus https://github.com/jupyterlite/xeus
There may be an easy way to wrap GHC with jupyterlite/xeus, with Haskell's lazy evaluation; xeus-haskell or xeus-ghc?
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#29For those not well versed in Haskell, GHC is apparently this: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ What is GHC? GHC is a state-of-the-art, open source compiler and interactive environment for the functional language Haskell.
GHC (the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, after its original host university) is the de facto Haskell compiler and simultaneously the main research vehicle for the language and the neighbouring design space in general.
And frankly, while the compiler is awesome and so is the research, the constant churn and seeming inability to settle on what the good programming style and set of features actually is is what eventually turned me away from the language and to the more stable (if near-abandoned) pastures of Standard ML. (That was during the type families upheaval, so, about ten years ago? Don’t know how well it reflects the current state of the project.)
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#30Interesting technical achievement but what would this be used for in practical terms?
For one, it demonstrates how far the ghc wasm backend has come, in that such a large system as ghc itself can now run in wasm