Plugging Haskell In

An interesting paper about writing dynamically loaded plugins in Haskell.

It’s really pretty straightforward. The open issues are basically:

  • While you can do dynamic typing, because we’re using the C linker and don’t get type annotations, you would still have to trust the plugin to get it right—there’s not yet any way to get safe dynamic typechecking.
  • Current Haskell runtimes are always statically linked, resulting in plugin bloat. In the long-term Haskell implementations should start taking better advantage of the platform’s dynamic linker.

The authors have also written a couple applications based on dynamically loadable plugins in Haskell.

(Hat Tip: Lambda the Ultimate)

hoodwink.d enhanced