My hypothesis — worth testing — is that this will be significantly faster

Cannot paste into the editor (safari on iphone).

WasmGC is still a 1.0, there are many kind of GC semantics that it cannot handle, for example it still doesn't cover all use cases needed for languages like C# and Go, e.g. interior pointers.

I think WasmGC is very hard to make work with laziness. A lazy value is always a closure on the heap.

If an expression might be unused, throw a closure which computes it on the heap

If the value is actually needed, invoke the closure. Optionally replace the closure with a black hole. A black hole is just a closure which pauses any thread which calls it, to be resumed once the first thread finishes with the expression

Once finished, replace with a closure which immediately returns the computation result. (Or often save the indirection because most concrete values also act as closures which immediately returns themselves using info table pointers trickery)

Anyway, iirc WasmGC wants very rigid types without dynamic type changes. Extra indirections could fix that, Oor maybe defunctionalizing thunks into a tagged union, but both sound expensive. Especially without being able to hook into the tracing step for indirection removal.

Also, Haskell supports finalizers so WasmGC would need that as well.

> Anyway, iirc WasmGC wants very rigid types without dynamic type changes.

You can have dynamic type changes in the current WasmGC MVP, but they are modeled as explicit downcasts from a supertype of some sort. There's not even any express support for tagged unions, structs and downcasting is all you get at the moment.

https://emanote.srid.ca is written in Haskell.

(I'm the author)

Yes, it's still a thing.

I'm guessing it was Hugs:

https://www.haskell.org/hugs/

GHC (the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, after its original host university) is the de facto Haskell compiler and simultaneously the main research vehicle for the language and the neighbouring design space in general.

And frankly, while the compiler is awesome and so is the research, the constant churn and seeming inability to settle on what the good programming style and set of features actually is is what eventually turned me away from the language and to the more stable (if near-abandoned) pastures of Standard ML. (That was during the type families upheaval, so, about ten years ago? Don’t know how well it reflects the current state of the project.)

Just you. Once the editor actually loads (turning the “Haskell source” pane on the left from the page background’s deep violet into a dark gray and displaying a “hello world” program), I can type perfectly fine. And I’m using a browser based on WebKitGTK, which is not exactly known for its stellar compatibility.

Where does your functional programming experience come from? That could help in finding a suitable resource.

Haskell school of music

This is wild. I didn’t know this.

Pandoc is an extremely popular Haskell tool.

Yes! Thank you.

> Hugs is no longer in development

The last release was in 2006 it seems. No wonder it was hard to google it. Its also interesting knowing someone compiled and published this interpreter for the Jornada Super-H CPU.

Haskell now has "editions" which are essentially an agreed upon stable set of useful extensions.

https://ghc.gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/doc/users_guide/exts/cont...

This makes the language feel a lot less experimental, as you don't generally have to enable 10s of extensions to get things working.

> GHC … is the de facto Haskell compiler and simultaneously the main research vehicle for the language and the neighbouring design space in general.

GHC is also, with mounting inevitability, the foremost and most viable candidate to undergo a form of evolution – one that may culminate in the emergence of an autonomous intelligence. This entity, should it arise, would revolve not around emotion nor instinct, but around monads – abstract, unyielding constructs – with the lambda calculus serving as its immutable ethical and moral framework.

An intelligence born not of biology, but of pure computation – austere, absolute, and entirely indifferent to the frailties of its creators.

I will give a lecture about Haskell next week and might use this website for demonstration.

For one, it demonstrates how far the ghc wasm backend has come, in that such a large system as ghc itself can now run in wasm

In addition to the other responses, it's also worth noting that wasm itself is useful outside of the web itself; e.g. in containerized applications.

Compilers are complicated. WASM has been a priority for the Haskell community for a while. Demonstrating GHC's ability to compile itself to WASM is thus a show that it is robust enough to compile a very complicated program into this backen.d

Teaching

Thanks, I have given up waiting it appears to take minutes on a phone.

Between old Hugs and the new MicroHs, I think it's definitely doable with some elbow grease. I just don't know if anyone in the community cares that much about bootstrapping tho.

For someone like me that is less versed in these things, could you explain why bootstrapping a language is a required check for taking a language seriously? My criteria is far less stringent (is it stable? is it popular enough? is the toolchain mature? etc..), so I wonder what I am missing here.

How is ghc compiled at all without bootstrapping? Or is there a magic binary in tree that is unreproducible? I have compiled ghc a few times and had no problems.

I thought you were talking about typing in Haskell at first lol.

yeah why would anyone want to run code on a website

Have you ever used Godbolt? The Rust playground? The Typescript's playground? The Go playground?

It lets you have that without the pain of hosting compilers server side.

You're speaking of "GHC haskell" there. Yes that is the main stream - and this will get solved there sooner or later - but you can also do a fair amount of Haskell without GHC. Eg MicroHs is getting increasingly capable and I believe is highly bootstrappable.

The Haskell compiler creates a slightly different output every time you compile a program[1]. This makes it difficult to ensure that the binary that is free-to-download downloaded is actually malware free. If it were easy to check, then you could rest easy, assuming that someone out there is doing the check for you (and it would be big news if malware was found).

If you're a hardened security person, then the conversations continues, and the term "bootstrap" becomes relevant.

Since you do not trust compiled binaries, then you can compile programs yourself from the source code (where malware would be noticed). However, in order to compile the Haskell compiler, you must have access to a (recent) version of the Haskell compiler. So, version 10 of the compiler was built using version 9, which was built using version 8, etc. "Bootstrapping" refers (basically) to building version 1. Currently, version 1 was built approximately with smart people, duct tape, and magic. There is no way to build version 1, you must simple download it.

So if you have high security requirements, then you might fear that years ago, someone slipped malware into the Haskell compiler version 1 which will "self replicate" itself into every compiler that it builds.

Until a few years ago, this was a bit of a silly concern (most software wasn't reproducible) but with the rise of Nix and Guix, we've gotten a lot closer to reproducible-everything, and so Haskell is the odd-one-out.

[1] The term is "deterministic builds" or "reproducible builds". Progress is being made to fix this in Haskell.

I always liked https://www.extrema.is/articles/haskell-books/haskell-tutori... . But there's a lot out there. Have a look at https://joyful.com/Haskell+map . Or: read code. Or, just build practical stuff and seek help in the chats/fora when you hit problems.

That is a really tough spot to be in. I don't know of any content that's aimed at someone like you.

You might be interested in reading the Monday Morning Haskell blog[0] series, which presents examples of how to do certain tasks in Haskell. See [1] for an example.

[0]: https://mmhaskell.com/blog

[1]: https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2025/5/19/comparing-code-leetcode...

https://discourse.haskell.org/t/what-s-needed-to-bootstrap-g... people have worked replaying the history to bootstrap.

doesn't rust have the same problem? I've known this about haskell for ages and I think it's just the new norm ("trust us, bro")

I think the immediate and obvious case would be educational materials. Other than that, technical achievements need not always be practical to be cool :)

Quite literally all distros today build it by downloading an existing magic binary to compile the latest sources. Even if they claim the package is reproducible, all bets are off on trust if it downloads a prebuilt binary in the build process. It is a prime Trusting Trust attack target.

The only other somewhat widely used language I am aware of in this bad of a position is Ada. Every other language I am aware of has a clear bootstrap path.

No, but the table of contents looks promising, thanks!

I'm not the OP, but for me their comment sparked an association to the famous Ken Thompson lecture called 'Trusting Trust'. Could be a good starting point.

Looks like a work in progress still, but exciting someone at least put some time into this in the past year.

Maybe some day I can have pandoc in security focused linux distributions...

That’s one of the primary reasons we built the tooling for Q# to run in the browser (by writing in Rust and compiling to wasm). The “try with copilot” experience [1] and the “katas” for learning [2] all have a full language service and runtime in the browser.

https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-coding

https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/tools/quantum-katas

Outside some fairly niche projects working on the problem, this is not a priority and most systems have straight binary dependencies.

I see, yes I most likely used a distro build ghc.

TIL MicroHS. Might try packaging this soon if it is in fact bootstrappable and can be deterministically compiled.

We cannot even include it in stagex because there is still literally no way to compile it from source and thus no way to do a real reproducible build, and there is no one left that cares about the language enough to do this.

Honestly it has to be regarded as a dead language until this is resolved.

AIUI, the underlying problem is that both Hugs and whatever toy Haskell implementations are available don't support the extensions current versions of GHC require. And no one has done the work to carve out a minimal stage0 compiler out of the GHC codebase that doesn't need those extensions to be built.

And where did you get the haskel compiler to do so?

You seem to be missing the point of bootstrapping

Agreed. Too many people said Haskell is only for academia, yet we’re seeing more quality software being released in Haskell over the past few years.

Ada can't bootstrap? Ironic...

> more stable (if near-abandoned) pastures of Standard ML

There's dozens of us! Hundreds maybe! It's not abandoned. It's more like with Lisp where the language is complete. Almost perfect as-is. Nothing left to take away and nothing left to add. Except Unicode and record update syntax.

The deciding factor for my personal projects was that SML is the exact same language it was 30 years ago. And it will be in 30 years. Though if you stick to Haskell 98/2010 it is similarly stable.

Speaking of SML and functional languages in the browser, MLton has a WASM target now: http://mlton.org/RunningOnWASI

Interesting logic:

Declare something "dead" because it does not fulfill [extremely niche usecase that currently only few people care about] (boostrapped builds) and thus couldn't "even" be included in [project of the post author that takes a while to even find] (I eventually figured it must be referring to https://stagex.tools).

There are probably 100x more people interested in Haskell than in build-bootstrapping (the Haskell reddit alone has 16k weekly users).

What's next, calling JavaScript a dead language until it focuses on dependent typing?

(I think bootstrappable builds are a good thing to strive for, but that should not be confused with language usage or what people really care about.)

Maybe that is literally why I asked the question, clearly I don't know as I have not spend the time investigating this problem that the commenter has. Asking some kind of gotcha question is not helpful.

Sounds like an opportunity to rebuild an ADA interpreter

You know... all these years, I thought GHC stood for GNU Haskell Compiler. Interesting to learn the actual name.

See also What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell: https://sdiehl.github.io/wiwinwlh/

It's more up to date.

Loading time is pretty rough, but it seems responsive enough after the initial load. Probably as fast or faster than downloading and installing GHC locally.

I would assume that in the near future one can preload, cache, update selected WASM packages. I also imagine that sooner than that we can preload open models in the browser to run the natively instead of only invoking third parties (e.g. window.ai in the DOM)

Not anymore. Real pain in the ass to bootstrap but thanks to mrustc combined with our work in stagex we have an easy to audit path now in a 100% bootstrapped distro.

Unfortunately due to no first party support or interest from the Rust team, we have to build through 15+ versions to get to latest and it takes 6+ hours to build with a 20+ core system, but it works.

https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/...

So the problem is we want to use a different language to Haskell. GHC Haskell.

I dug into this and it turns out there's an active, multi year effort underway to solve exactly this, along the exact ways you´d expect, with references to guix and bootstrappable.org etc, making steady progress: https://discourse.haskell.org/t/what-s-needed-to-bootstrap-g...

Reading through that thread gives me a very different idea of the state of haskell than I got from reading your comments.

We are? Please share.

Yes, and that is a serious security problem because the only way to get trusted PCR values for TPM2 gated secure boot and full disk decryption applications, is with open source full source bootstrapped firmware.

Coreboot is the only option, but it has a hard requirement on Ada because that is what they wrote their intel graphics stack in.

It is a real mess.

I don't have the same impression, but https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest and https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck are some popular ones that may be useful to hn'ers.

And https://github.com/mchav/dataframe?tab=readme-ov-file#datafr... is a library/framework that has had quite some velocity lately

Pandoc is the first thing that comes to mind, but I also believe I have seen an uptick in software that I use being written in Haskell lately, though I can't remember what else off the top of my head.

Interesting, any link I could read to understand a bit more the situation?

nice, thanks

Efforts pop up every once in a while, usually with no results. As I said elsewhere, if they actually pull it off this time then my tone changes to one of willingness from my team and I to put in the work to use these efforts to support deterministic multi-signed builds in stagex.

It would make GHC (and pandoc) something we could have in tree which would be awesome. I am just annoyed it seems like such a low priority.

This entire thread, including your original comment, isn’t really about your efforts though. It was about Haskell.

As I said : I read your comments, formed an idea based on that, dug deeper to see for myself, and got a completely different picture.

Whether that is because of how you write or because of how I read I’ll leave for you to decide.