Functional languages for mobile development

[Jon Harrop]

 

What functional languages have good support for iOS and Android development?

 

Given that Android is JVM-based I’m guessing JVM languages like Clojure and Scala would out-of-the-box. Is that correct?

 

I thought OCaml might have a great Android story but I checked and it is completely dead. F# has the Xamarin toolstack but that doesn’t look viable until Xamarin support F#.

 

--

Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.

http://www.ffconsultancy.com

[7sharp9]

I think theres an up and coming market for different language within the mobile development market, unfortunately most of them are not functional languages.  What I see is most Ruby and Lua for iOS as well as you mentioned Xamarin for C#.  

I have seen a Scala demo that compiled Scaler to an IKVM backend then used Xamarin.IOS to produce the native arm code for the device,

It would be great to have a backend for F# that directly outputted arm code without any intermediaries. 

Dave.

[7sharp9]

Google appear to be going down the AOT route with Android now:  meet-art-part-1-the-new-super-fast-android-runtime-google-has-been-working-on-in-secret-for-over-2-years-debuts-in-kitkat/

It may be possible to leverage that in the future once it becomes more stable.

[Philip Potter]

Android is Java-based but not JVM-based; it uses Dalvik instead. This
means that JVM FP languages are not a simple shoo-in on android :(

There is a clojure-android project and associated google group. The
big names are Daniel Solano Gomez and Alexander Yakushev. I don't know
if it's just a research project or worthy of serious app development
at the moment. I've used the Clojure REPL from the android store and
while it's impressive that it exists at all, it's slooow.

Here's some more background reading:

http://clojure-android.blogspot.co.uk/
https://nightweb.net/blog/clojure-on-android.html

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