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by ablesearcher 3871 days ago
Reflex is great (and its author is a genius) but it's not really useful yet for non-desktop apps. Because Reflex + GHCJS is impossibly slow on mobile.

As an experiment, try using chrome (iOS) or android to load this:

obsidian.systems/reflex-nyhug/

or this:

https://obsidian.systems/

They're both reflex apps.

GHCJS is bees-knees. But unfortunately, minimizing-code-size/mobile-performance has not been a priority. (It's understandable, as Luite can't do everything himself.) (Aside: the best solution I've seen -- in terms of generated code size -- in GHCJS-land right now is: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/react-flux. Anecdotal, though. YMMV.)

I can't wait for GHCJS to be ready for prime time. I wish all these alt-JS-haskellish language authors (of Purescript, Elm, Roy, etc.) would just work on making GHCJS better.

It's a bummer that Clojure and Scala are much newer than Haskell and yet they both have a mature, production-ready JS compiler. The statically typed ML-family is too small for multiple JS compilers. The entire community needs to pick one and let the others die. Otherwise, we end up with several half-baked solutions and not a single industrial-strength one.
1 comments
purescript 3871 days ago
> I wish all these alt-JS-haskellish language authors (of PureScript, Elm, Roy, etc.) would just work on making GHCJS better.

All three of those have very different goals and trade-offs from GHCJS.

I agree that it would be nice to share more work/knowledge though. One of the nice things about AltJS is that several languages can coexist in the same codebase.

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ablesearcher 3871 days ago
> "All three of those have very different goals and trade-offs from GHCJS."

And therein lies the problem. In my view, the most important goal is to have at least one really good AltJS-Haskellish language with a fully-featured ecosystem of libraries. (I'm fine if that language is PureScript, btw. PureScript is fantastic.) The problem -- which Clojure and Scala programmers seem to have sorted -- is that our community is too small to support several Haskellish-AltJS compilers. Do we really want several perpetually nascent solutions?

> "One of the nice things about AltJS is that several languages can coexist in the same codebase."

Theoretically, you're right. But how many production code bases are there in AltJS-Haskell (vs. say, Clojurescript)?

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galfarragem 3871 days ago
Normally very smart people have an huge ego and hate politics. It's always a pity to see so much potential wasted.
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