I’d like to discuss this segment:
NV: So I still find it amazing that you use Haskell to develop games and to make them run in your browser. So I want to ask as somebody who doesn’t know anything on how to build all this stuff in Haskell, how can i start?
JVdJ: So well, this is actually, these two games are actually written in PureScript, not in Haskell, and before that I also tried to do some games in Elm as well and I also tried Haskell in the browser. Yeah, these three are really the the ones I’ve tried: PureScript, Haskell, Elm. I would, I think Haskell in the browser has come a long way and it’s definitely possible to program games like this, right, because they’re not computationally the most expensive, like you don’t have to sort of squeeze every bit of performance out of your JavaScript.
The hard questions are being skipped over here. Jasper admits not to using Haskell in a space where it is available, because clone languages are also available. But there is no discussion of what is really wrong with GHCJS, how to get Haskell on WebAssembly, whether backwards compatible RTS changes are necessary. Is laziness all that needs to be mentioned here?
It’s ironic to me that the episode with Lennart Augustsson explained that Haskell was created to unify all the (lazy) languages, but now even prominent Haskellers are choosing alternatives, and it’s not really discussed! We even have Haskell derivatives (Idris) explicitly having multiple backends; it could be seen as a way to avoid the RTS situation GHC Haskell has.