Plugging Haskell In
AndrÈ Pang, Don Stewart, Sean Seefried, and Manuel M. T. Chakravarty.
Submitted to the 2004 Haskell Workshop.
Abstract
Extension languages enable users to expand the functionality of an application without touching its source code. Commonly, these languages are dynamically typed languages, such as Lisp, Python, or domain-specific languages, which support runtime plugins via dynamic loading of components. We show that Haskell can be comfortably used as a statically typed extension language, and that it can support type-safe dynamic loading of plugins using dynamic types. Moreover, we discuss how plugin support is especially useful to applications where Haskell is used as an embedded domain-specific language (EDSL). We explain how to realise type-safe plugins using dynamic types, runtime compilation, and dynamic linking, exploiting infrastructure provided by the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. We demonstrate the practicability of our approach with several applications that serve as running examples.
Download
The paper’s official website, where you can download the hs-plugins library and example programs, is at http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/hs-plugins/paper/.
12 pages: Postscript (.ps.gz), Adobe Acrobat PDF. The copyright for the papers is held by the authors or by the publisher. The papers are provided for personal use only; other use requires the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{PSSC04,
author = {Andr{\'e} Pang and Don Stewart and Sean Seefried and Manuel M. T. Chakravarty},
title = {Plugging Haskell in},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell},
year = {2004},
isbn = {1-58113-850-4},
pages = {10--21},
location = {Snowbird, Utah, USA},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1017472.1017478},
publisher = {ACM Press},
}