GHCJS introduction – Concurrent Haskell in the browser by Luite Stegeman.
From the post:
After many months of hard work, we are finally ready to show you the new version of GHCJS. Our goal is to provide a full-featured Haskell runtime in the browser, with features like threading, exceptions, weak references and STM, allowing you to run existing libraries with minimal modification. In addition we have some JavaScript-specific features to make communication with the JS world more convenient. GHCJS uses its own package database and comes with Cabal and Template Haskell support.
The new version (gen2) is almost a ground-up rewrite of the older (trampoline/plain) versions. We built on our experience with the trampoline code generator, by Victor Nazarov and Hamish Mackenzie. The most important changes are that we now use regular JavaScript objects to store Haskell heap objects (instead of JS closures), and that we have switched to explicit stacks in a JavaScript array. This helps reduce the amount of memory allocation considerably, making the resulting code run much faster. GHCJS now uses Gershom Bazerman’s JMacro library for generating JavaScript and for the Foreign Function Interface.
This post is a practical introduction to get started with GHCJS. Even though the compiler mostly works now, it’s far from finished. We’d love to hear some feedback from users and get some help preparing libraries for GHCJS before we make our first official release (planned to coincide with the GHC 7.8 release). I have listed some fun projects that you can help us with at the end of this post. Join #ghcjs on freenode for discussion with the developers and other users.
Functional programming in your browser.