Serious question. Is Haskell still a thing?
GHC now runs in the browser
61–70 of 131 posts
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#62Unfortunately there is still no way to actually bootstrap haskell (or anything based on it) which makes it impossible to put anything written in Haskell near any high trust linux distribution or environment. I guess sandboxing the untrusted binary in a browser is -something- to let people play with haskell in a lower risk way for the moment at least but it is hard to take a language seriously or trust it with no way…
For someone like me that is less versed in these things, could you explain why bootstrapping a language is a required check for taking a language seriously? My criteria is far less stringent (is it stable? is it popular enough? is the toolchain mature? etc..), so I wonder what I am missing here.
I'm not the OP, but for me their comment sparked an association to the famous Ken Thompson lecture called 'Trusting Trust'. Could be a good starting point.
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#63This 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.
Cannot paste into the editor (safari on iphone).
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite literally all distros today build it by downloading an existing magic binary to compile the latest sources. Even if they claim the package is reproducible, all bets are off on trust if it downloads a prebuilt binary in the build process. It is a prime Trusting Trust attack target. The only other somewhat widely used language I am aware of in this bad of a position is Ada. Every other language I am aware of has…
Ada can't bootstrap? Ironic...
Sounds like an opportunity to rebuild an ADA interpreter
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#65Unfortunately there is still no way to actually bootstrap haskell (or anything based on it) which makes it impossible to put anything written in Haskell near any high trust linux distribution or environment. I guess sandboxing the untrusted binary in a browser is -something- to let people play with haskell in a lower risk way for the moment at least but it is hard to take a language seriously or trust it with no way…
Between old Hugs and the new MicroHs, I think it's definitely doable with some elbow grease. I just don't know if anyone in the community cares that much about bootstrapping tho.
AIUI, the underlying problem is that both Hugs and whatever toy Haskell implementations are available don't support the extensions current versions of GHC require. And no one has done the work to carve out a minimal stage0 compiler out of the GHC codebase that doesn't need those extensions to be built.
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is ghc compiled at all without bootstrapping? Or is there a magic binary in tree that is unreproducible? I have compiled ghc a few times and had no problems.
Quite literally all distros today build it by downloading an existing magic binary to compile the latest sources. Even if they claim the package is reproducible, all bets are off on trust if it downloads a prebuilt binary in the build process. It is a prime Trusting Trust attack target. The only other somewhat widely used language I am aware of in this bad of a position is Ada. Every other language I am aware of has…
Outside some fairly niche projects working on the problem, this is not a priority and most systems have straight binary dependencies.
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#67Can anyone point to a "practical Haskell" tutorial/book/whatever for people that already know functional programming? I'm in this sour spot where most tutorials are boring to me so I just can't follow through.
I know what a monad is. What a typeclass is. Even what HKTs are. I can make sense of "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" if I give it a few minutes to unravel the ball of twine... But I wouldn't be able to code a "ToDo list" in Haskell if my life depended on it.
Pls help.
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#68Can anyone point to a "practical Haskell" tutorial/book/whatever for people that already know functional programming? I'm in this sour spot where most tutorials are boring to me so I just can't follow through. I know what a monad is. What a typeclass is. Even what HKTs are. I can make sense of "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" if I give it a few minutes to unravel the ball of twine... But I w…
You might be better served talking to ChatGPT/Claude so it can tailor explanations based on your level of understanding. I've found that being super clear about concepts you understand well vs concepts you're unclear about makes for really effective explanations.
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#69Can anyone point to a "practical Haskell" tutorial/book/whatever for people that already know functional programming? I'm in this sour spot where most tutorials are boring to me so I just can't follow through. I know what a monad is. What a typeclass is. Even what HKTs are. I can make sense of "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" if I give it a few minutes to unravel the ball of twine... But I w…
Have you tried Real World Haskell?
Re: GHC now runs in the browser
#70Can anyone point to a "practical Haskell" tutorial/book/whatever for people that already know functional programming? I'm in this sour spot where most tutorials are boring to me so I just can't follow through. I know what a monad is. What a typeclass is. Even what HKTs are. I can make sense of "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" if I give it a few minutes to unravel the ball of twine... But I w…
Have you tried Real World Haskell?
No, but the table of contents looks promising, thanks!