Crazy Ideas

Having a small, clean, simple, production strength Haskell compiler lets a lot of people come up with Crazy ideas that just weren't feasible before. (alright, so Yhc certainly isn't production strength yet, but it could be without too much work...)

Some of the crazy ideas are listed at on the wiki, some others have been sent out in emails. Quite a lot aren't crazy at all, but would be really useful! Just a quick summary of some side projects/tools that are being developed, or have been thought of:

• Haskell HBC -> Java bytecode
• Javascript runtime for HBC files
• Python runtime for HBC files
• Playstation port (entirely speculation so far)

I also came up with a new crazy idea for Yhc, HsNub. Have you ever written a function, and later found out that it did the same as a function in the prelude? Take the Yhc code base, I recently eliminated the function second, which is equivalent to the Prelude function const. It would have been nice if something spotted this and gave out a warning. With a portable bytecode, this isn't that much work - two functions can be seen as equivalent if they are identical at the bytecode level. I intend to write this tool once I have a working bytecode library - I don't expect it to take more than an hour at most - thats the nice thing about having a relatively simple Haskell implementation!