Haskell for mobile development [closed]

Question

I know its possible to use haskell with web development, but what about for mobile development? Since Haskell runs almost flawlessly windows, Linux, and Mac, I can't see why this wouldn't be possible.

Answer 1

GHC does support ARM to some extent, so you could compile Haskell programs to run on most mobile phones.

That said, there's very little library support for Haskell mobile applications on the big platforms (iOS and Android) at the moment. The issue is that they use custom system and UI libraries that aren't (really) available outside their ecosystems. You could interface Haskell code with Android or iOS apps (probably via the C bindings), but there's no automated way of it, and there's no simple library to use. So, although you could write some Haskell program that computes something, getting input from a user, and showing them the result would be quite a hassle (see the relevant HaskellWiki articles on Android and IPhone).

Your best bet at the moment would probably be Maemo, which should be able to run GTK Haskell apps for ARM without much hassle. That said, there aren't many Maemo phones out there. There are also a few other mobile distributions that just run vanilla Linux systems and those would work just as well; in particular, any tablet that runs a vanilla Linux (as opposed to Android, or some other heavily customized distribution) would probably run even graphical Haskell apps just fine.