> THC now implements every one of GHC 9.14.1’s prim-ops and provides a JIT for GHC Core that runs Haskell on the JVM
Look, it's very cool and a great project, but I just don't think you should call the compiler "turbo $something" if you're not going to make it a TUI IDE.
Only tangentially related, but I'm reminded of Frege[0], a Haskell dialect for the JVM that I stumbled across at one point and thought looked really cool.... I see recent commits but the releases are all really old, so I can't tell what the state of the project is.
I hadn't thought of Fregue in some years! I helped them with their logo and some smaller issues back in the time. I will check out the latest commits to see what's being updated (hopefully not only dependabot:) ).
https://github.com/ekmett/hide takes on that part of the project (formerly thc-edit mentioned in a couple of other replies). Not Turbo Vision based per se, but has that same classic style of UI. It renders itself via terminal, metal, vulkan or webgl UI and provides editor services, AI agent support, autocomplete, and can connect to another instance over SSH to provide these presentation services over the network.
Text is presented in a faux IBM VGA font, blue background, and in any of the non-terminal choices a subtle CRT grading/vignetting is applied if desired, but it is extended to full unicode including emoji with an optional stylization pass to make them feel more like the period editor experience. You can even switch display modes because most of the time I used Borland tools in my youth I'd run them in 80x50 mode.
My general intent is that the final installer will package both of them, just like Turbo Pascal bundled TP and TPC or Turbo C bundled TC and TCC.
Part of the name was a joke about people often mishearing Haskell as Pascal, Ed told me a couple of years ago. I think it might have been at ZuriHac back when it was at Google Zurich, so 2016-ish?
Since there is MicroHS Haskell compiler in 0.5 MB space nothing is stopping people to wire it together with TurboVision/ncurses. Apart from that the name is taken now.
Wow, such a typical Haskell thing. There's a project with zero explanation with a pragmatic angle, and even asking questions about it is discouraged. What's the downvote for? I get it, Haskell on JVM, but what's the point? What kind of personal or maybe well-known and recognized itch Kmeth is trying to solve here? No? We, the mere mortals are not worthy to know that, until we reach the "enlightenment phase"?
We get a JITTed runtime, which can actually beat compiled GHC in performance in cases.
We get first-class cross-language FFI to truffled language implementations: Python, Ruby, R, Javascript with shared objects, which can JIT together. The idea is that fully fleshed out this would give Haskell a clean path to reach over to pytorch to run an AI model, take the answers, smash them through some statistical analysis using an obscure R library and send the result to d3.js to get pretty visualizations. Are we there yet? Hell no.
We get access to the java incubator vector API allowing us to JIT SIMD kernels for the target platform with less pain. Haskell has just been bad at high speed SIMD code since I found my way into the ecosystem, and it hasn't shown much sign of getting better. This lets me theoretically sidestep those issues.
Using Sulong for C/C++ FFI means we don't give up native cbits and host code, unlike old bad hard-to-use JVM language ports like JPython.
Future work could for instance make Natural number code use java deoptimization paths keeping it generally in unboxed ints until you finally need something too big through a given codepath. Again, just more paths to potentially make things faster or easier to use.
Without Truffle/Graal the limitations of the JVM are just too severe. It is an awkward runtime full of limitations. The lack of proper tail call optimization for instance would kill GHC-style evaluation performance, and has left a long list of functional language corpses in its wake that tried to make the JVM their home.
With the "Cadenza trick" I use to eliminate that we can have highly performant loops. Using assumptions lets it compile with the equivalent of GHC's single threaded runtime and then downgrade performance to the equivalent of the multi-threaded runtime when you first call a threading operation, so users don't have to pick, they just get the benefits. I, in turn, get headaches.
We get stuff that GHC just will never even try to get around to. CompressedOOPS give us 32 bit pointers on 64 bit platforms if the heap is < ~32GB. So about twice as much stuff can fit into cache especially in a language with as many pointers running around as ours compared to the normal Haskell runtime.
My goal is to keep pushing forward with the bits that this can do that GHC can't do, and to generally try to get to or maintain parity wherever possible for the things that GHC can do.
It also helps us tease apart where the line should be for GHC as a runtime system vs. GHC as a compiler. The former has been languishing behind comparatively, ever since Simon Marlow left GHC headquarters to go fight spam for Meta.
I wrote a blog post targeted at an insider audience to tease at something that was coming. It has since spread outside of that audience. There's no gatekeeping going on here, no secret enlightenment required, just a poorly drafted research note thrown over the fence to his peers to see if anybody else might be interested in his new favorite toy by a very busy person. I'm sorry.
I genuinely appreciate your explanation, and I'm sorry that it appears as if I rage-baited you into wasting your time answering my question, which in retrospect does look as if I asked "why does this exist [at all]?"
I don't even write Haskell actively, but I still wanted to understand. If I've learned anything about your work, it's that whatever experimentation you do is worth paying attention to, even if it may end up not going anywhere later.
The "JVM has no tail-call optimization" angle was one of the first questions that came to my mind, and TIL about your Cadenza trick - very interesting.
Another thing I'd be curious to explore is the polyglot interop. My guess is that with THC I can call Haskell code directly from Clojure, and it looks like it might even be possible already today. The other direction, I suppose, might be slightly more difficult, since Clojure is not a Truffle language.
Anyway, I'll try to find some time to dig deeper; this effort of yours is enormously intriguing.
ps. I just realized I misspelled your name in my prior comment. I'm not sure how that have happened, sorry about that. It's not like that I don't even know who you are, I have met you in person.
Java FFI can be done, it is just on the messier end of the spectrum. I do a little bit of it as needed, but I've focused in on Polyglot languages for now, and deferred a lot of the hooks for nicely handling it to later work.
Talking about Java FFI invites you to say 'well then smart-ass how do you extend this Java class/interface over here with code written in your language' and frankly, that has never had a satisfying answer for any language that isn't Java.
But today you can pass Haskell Data.Text out through the FFI binding framework and it shows up on the other side as a valid TruffleString, in UTF-8 with zero copy semantics and if any Truffle language passes in a TruffleString that is UTF-8 encoded it gets unwrapped into Data.Text using the same.
That and some array support is pretty much enough to talk to everybody else.
now that there's all the rage about agentic coding - & languages don't matter - why r people not migrating to more less error prone languages like Haskell ?
I've had much better experiences with Haskell (well, mostly PureScript for now) than Python, but that might be because I am very hands-on with the design of the core types and abstractions I'm working with.
Having an effect system so that Claude is not tempted to throw in side-effects everywhere helps a lot too!
(For further context, I was comparing essentially vibe code across languages. Vibe-coded Clojure stood out as much less unpalatable than anything else I tried.)
Because a) the LLMs are pretty good at Java and what not, and b) the LLMs are less good at more rarely used programming languages since there is less material on those to train on.
The pre-LLM popularity of languages remains sticky because it influences what libraries are available, the sophistication of the tooling, and of course, sticky developer preferences. So while the playing fields may shift a little, it resembles what came before. Also, in my circles I've noticed it's very easy for us to rationalize why our previous favorite language is also the perfect language for the agent era.
If your favorite language before was Python, why, LLMs are fluent in it! So much training data! So many libraries! Home of machine learning! None of that pesky compile time, agents don't need compile time safety anyway, they write such good test coverage! It's The Perfect Agentic Coding Language.
If it was Rust, by jove, an agent can easily handle the headache of satisfying the borrow checker, and now you get the best of all worlds! Safety! Near-C runtime performance! Abstractions! The only reason people didn't use Rust before was it was Too Hard and there were Too Many Furries and now it's not hard and you don't have to interact with them, so get on board. It's The Perfect Agentic Coding Language.
If it was Golang, oh my goodness, what a choice. Pretty fast compile time and pretty fast runtime. Agents get a tight feedback loop with build->run->test->edit. Not very complicated, code has to be written in a straightforward banging-rocks-together way. Good stable ecosystem! Rob Pike designed the language for people he said were "not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software." That's an arrogant, demeaning way to describe your colleagues but if they're LLM agents it's dead on! It's The Perfect Agentic Coding Language.
I could go on and on. I'm not immune either! My own favorite language is F# and I play the same game:
It has access to the .NET ecosystem like C#, but I don't have to constantly remind the agents to prefer a style with immutable data and pure functions, they idiomatically do that in F#. Files have to be in order and can only refer to symbols defined "earlier" in order, if you want mutually-referential types or functions they have to be declared as such in a joint statement, so spaghetti is hard to create: each project's codebase naturally ends up in a layered bottom-to-top architecture. The language is terse enough to be token efficient, without being symbol soup. FSX scripts can be generated during agentic code reviews to demonstrate repros for discovered issues. If there's any type of code that still warrants me jumping in and writing some myself, that code would be data type definitions/domain modelling, and F# is a joy to write those in. It's The Perfect Agentic Coding Language.
Kmett is a legend in Haskell. He writes and maintains tens of libraries - since the 2000s. Even before LLMs, Kmett had an output like most of us can do only with LLMs. Seriously, the guy is a coding machine.
i see, but my statement does not become false because of it. his agent pushes several commits an hour in a continuous loop, meaning this respected developer is not involved in the process at all.
The article gives a link to the discussion on Reddit. In it, Edward says
"I actually did pretty much gave up sleep for a week. That said there are a few hour stretches here and there where I leave it on mostly cleanup tasks and doze off. you can find a couple of 2-3 hour breaks where it got hung up on approval while I was lights out. "
He wore out the vim movement keys on a mac laptop keyboard in four months.
By "wore out" I mean he had worn the plastic down to the keyswitches, in FOUR MONTHS.
We once had an emergency production outage and Kmett got more productive as he stayed up later. At about 36 hours he fixed the problem. I fell over asleep, he fixed other problems he'd found during the investigation.
I have lots more Ed stories, but this output you question does not surprise me.
I briefly worked with him personally. He is 1. a perfectionist and 2. equipped with the intellectual and programming firepower to not get stuck in the resulting paralysis that a lot of people get stuck in but blast through tasks that should be impossible to do at all, let alone with a high degree of quality, successfully, through sheer intellectual firepower. The end result is that he is well known for already having not just one incredible Haskell library, but a number of them.
I can promise you he will not produce and release "slop". He would be an order of magnitude more offended at the idea than you are, I'd imagine.
In the original commenter's defense, I _did_ let the agents I have working on this get a more than a bit test harness crazy back when I was able to use GHC itself as a behavioral oracle. That worked fine through the initial build out, but then it rushed ahead with a broken CI due to misalignment in priorities, and then kept piling fixtures on top of fixtures and didn't properly track their cross-dependencies. My work on this in the last 48 hours has mostly been about getting that part under control and stable across my target platforms so I have better bedrock to build atop.
> not just one incredible Haskell library, but a number of them
...and this still understates his impact on Haskell, he helped shape how a lot of programs are written in Haskell through some of the stuff he worked on (see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/2769840 as evidence of his influence on core functionality).
in that case it is truly amazing, because I have never seen anyone even with current ai capable of being so productive and truly understanding what they are putting out.
Ed Kmett is one of the smartest people I have ever met in my life. He is quite literally built different.
He completed undergrad and graduate programs in math, computer science, and a special program in ai all simultaneously in 3 years. I believe he was finishing programs before his scholarships could kick in.
Look, it's very cool and a great project, but I just don't think you should call the compiler "turbo $something" if you're not going to make it a TUI IDE.
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