[VDZ19] Eta lang - Haskell On JVM by Jarek Ratajski

Jarek Ratajski introduces Eta, a dialect of Haskell that runs on the JVM, explaining its compilation strategy and Java interoperability.

After 20 years of evolution Java Virtual Machine became a real masterpiece of engineering that can easily outperform static compilers in many cases. There are however, lots of issues arising when someone tries to implement purely functional language on the JVM. It was considered particularly hard creating an efficient Haskell implementation for it. Developers of Eta tried it once again in a little bit different way. We will check how did they manage to solve typical problems like tail call optimizations and what is the overall performance of Eta. We will check how does it compare to GHC (Haskell). We will also consider a few examples, where the business logic is written in Haskell/Eta, but the middle-ware and other components are in Java. We analyze various approaches when it makes sense and how does it compare to the pure Java/Haskell implementations. Maybe your next JVM language will be Haskell!