I expect that relying on LLVM going forward will be the popular approach for Haskell and other languages (there's so much momentum behind LLVM and it's made to be built upon), it's fantastic to see people entering this space.
Despite the amount of derision Javascript and the web-as-a-platform idea is met with, the amount of innovation is undeniable. I personally think the web is the best platform (at the very least, it's the devil almost everyone knows) -- it's already ubiquitous, has more-than-good-enough solutions for most things and is supported by very huge companies and open source naturally. One of the main hangups for those who dislike the web-as-a-platform idea spreading usually call out the terribleness of Javascript the language -- and though I think transpiled solutions like Typescript[0] and Elm[1]/Purescript[2] fix this issue, the introduction of WASM will finally completely obliterate this long-standing hangup. You want to write some other language for your JS frontend? Soon you'll be able to.
JavaFX/QT/GTK/WxWidgets/etc people you had your chance (in the last decade or two) to create simple, cross-platform yet sufficiently feature full implementations and people are choosing bundling an entire browser to get away from the tools you're giving them. If someone develops a sufficient stripped down browser rendering interface or if projects like ion[3] take off, even more people (with relatively simple apps to write) will use the web platform I think.
As WASM gets better, the "native UI & speed" island is going to continue to shrink, in my estimation. Of course you've also got approaches like Flutter out there trying to render every single pixel (!), with enough weight to actually make it happen and provide full sets of widgets and even work on a desktop embedder[4] (shame about the only viable language being dart though...).
> I expect that relying on LLVM going forward will be the popular approach for Haskell and other languages
My vague understanding that might be outdated by a few years is that LLVM isn't a very nice target for garbage collected languages. It does have support for GC hooks, stack maps etc., but somehow people are (were?) struggling to make it all work efficiently in the real world.
More precisely, someone who works at Google is working on that:
This is not an officially supported Google product. This is an exploratory effort, and is not part of the Flutter project.
It being under the google GitHub organization doesn't mean much about the backing, since Google demands copyright for all kinds of things their employees do.
Hi, asterius main dev here. Garbage collection support is near; we're working actively on it, and after a few regressions are fixed it'll be available on master.
It'll be a copying GC, with builtin support to automatically free unused JavaScript references in the Haskell heap. It's also possible to plug in more fancy gc algorithms later (e.g. generational, or concurrent ones with read barriers).
There does exist a wasm anyref proposal which enables manipulating opaque references in wasm and a gc proposal for further allocating/using such garbage collected objects. However, basing our gc on those is currently less pragmatic than rolling our own :)
The consensus of "the same way they do in native code" is a probable approach, but it's worth calling out an additional complication in this setting: you might wind up working with two garbage collectors, with references in one keeping objects in the other alive. This isn't intractable, but it is messy.
Yes, like the IE memory leaks (and early Mozilla leaks) where DOM and JavaScript objects are collected in a different way, so can easily get stuck in unfreeable reference cycles.
Old Frameworks have to do perverse things to break those cycles, and if they don't, the browsers leaked memory over time.
It would be sad if that came back to modern browsers, due to WASM and DOM using separate collectors. Or worse, multiple WASM components, (perhaps in different languages, perhaps not, but all different collectors), holding indirect, accidental references to each other because someone decided to use the components in the same DOM.
C and ASM don't have a GC either, and yet we can build GC collected languages on top of them. So it will be eventually be solved in the same fashion: By building a runtime environment on top of the underlying machine, which performs memory management incl. garbage collection.
Depending on how the runtime for "native Haskell" is implemented, the effort might be everything from just cross-compile it to building a completely separate runtime.
In assembly language, you can build an accurate garbage collector for your assembly language application. There are no hidden "not user servicable" areas in the run-time, like in C. You can set up your calling and framing conventions so the GC can trace the stack and know exactly where the root pointers are.
It's something that has been researched, but not deployed. It would implement GC memory tagging in the CPU or even the memory controller. Google Scholar should produce some good hits.
