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Mobile Haskell: Compiling lazy functional programs for the Java Virtual Machine

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Principles of Declarative Programming (ALP 1998, PLILP 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1490))

Abstract

This paper shows how lazy functional programs can be made mobile by compiling them for the Java Virtual Machine. The Haskell compiler it describes is based on the 〈Ν,G〉-machine, which is designed for implementing lazy functional languages on parallel processors. Although this is not the obvious thing to do, it leads to a particularly elegant set of translation rules. Sadly though, the speed of the resulting Java Virtual Machine code programs is disappointing due to the surprisingly high cost of memory allocation/reclamation in current implementations of the Java Virtual Machine. In future work, we intend to find out whether this high cost is a property of the Java Virtual Machine's design or its implementation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Exeter, EX4 4PT, Exeter, UK

    David Wakeling

Authors
  1. David Wakeling
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Editor information

Catuscia Palamidessi Hugh Glaser Karl Meinke

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Š 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Wakeling, D. (1998). Mobile Haskell: Compiling lazy functional programs for the Java Virtual Machine. In: Palamidessi, C., Glaser, H., Meinke, K. (eds) Principles of Declarative Programming. ALP PLILP 1998 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1490. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056624

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0056624

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65012-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49766-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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