Opinions: PureScript for the JVM?

[Erik Post]

Hi all,

There's been some discussion over the years about an alternative to Scala on the JVM. [1] Languages like Ermine and Frege have been discussed, among others, and I thought it would be interesting to gather some opinions about PureScript [2] amongst the Scalaz crowd.

In summary, PureScript is a strict Haskell-like language, written in Haskell, that compiles to JavaScript. It was originally written by Phil Freeman -- also responsible for the lovely book 'Purescript by Example' [2] -- which provides a nice introduction to the language. The community is very nice, with a very helpful IRC channel (#purescript), a mailing list on Google Groups, regular hangouts, etc.

Recently, PureScript's compiler has undergone some improvements in the general direction of multiple backend support, such as decoupling the AST from JavaScript and splitting it up into generic functional and imperative core ASTs. [3] [4] This should be a great enabler of PureScript on the JVM. Now all someone needs to do is to go ahead and write it...

I'd be curious to hear your opinions!

Cheers, Erik

[1] https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz/issues/655

[2] http://purescript.com/

[3] https://leanpub.com/purescript

[4] https://github.com/purescript/purescript/issues/710

[5] https://github.com/purescript/purescript/issues/711

[Tom Adams]

Knowing very little about PureScript, I think it's a great idea. 

Tom

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[Alois Cochard]

Hi Erik,

It is surely a very interesting idea!

It seems to me that PureScript could be a great alternative to Scala, also the community is quite active and the development is moving fast (which is not necessary the case of the other mentioned projects).

A fundamental difference to me with an approach like the one used by Ermine is in my opinion the usage of strict evaluation in PureScript.

That make things much easier to integrate with JVM, but at the same time that make the language -per se- less appealing to me.

I think both approach are interesting and worth investigating, I also care a lot about performance and -for now- it seems impossible to get good performance on the JVM with non-strict evaluation.

So yeah, I would surely follow and be interested in a project like that!

Cheers

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[Erik Post]

Thanks for your responses, Tom and Alois!

Cheers,

Erik