Purescript describes itself like so:
PureScript is a small strongly typed programming language that compiles to JavaScript.
It’s written in Haskell and borrows many concepts as well. It’s not the same though, and one distinguishing feature is that it compiles down to a small imperative core. It’s relatively easy to implement new backends for this core - one of them is in c++ 11.
The c++ backend has virtually no ecosystem and running it still requires some manual labour.
First we clone the repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/pure11/pure11
$ cd pure11
There is a stack.yml so you can use stack to build. I use NixOS 16.09:
$ cabal2nix . --shell > shell.nix
$ nix-shell
$ cabal build
The build will create a pcc binary. When you run it without inputs it will create a Makefile:
$ dist/build/pcc/pcc
Generating Makefile...
pcc executable location: /home/tom/src/pure11/dist/build/pcc/pcc
Done
Run 'make' or 'make release' to build an optimized release build.
The resulting binary executable will be located in output/bin (by default).
pure11 doesn’t have a package manager so we need to clone a few c++ specific packages by hand:
mkdir packages
cd packages
git clone https://github.com/pure11/purescript-prelude
git clone https://github.com/pure11/purescript-eff
git clone https://github.com/pure11/purescript-console
git clone https://github.com/pure11/purescript-control
We create a simple example program in src/Main.purs:
module Main where
import Control.Monad.Eff.Console (log, CONSOLE)
import Prelude (Unit)
import Control.Monad.Eff (Eff)
main :: forall e. Eff ( console :: CONSOLE | e ) Unit
main = log "hello from pure11"
and run make:
$ make
Compiling Data.NaturalTransformation
Compiling Data.Show
...
Creating output/Main/Main.o
...
Linking output/bin/main
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/tom/src/pure11'
which we can run:
$ output/bin/main
hello from pure11
Notes
This isn’t anywhere close to ready for production, but it’s amazing that this works in the first place.
In theory I can now use all the Purescript libraries that aren’t targeting JavaScript explicitly. I say “in theory” because I haven’t actually tried this.
In the near future Purescript will gain the ability to dump an imperative core which will make it even easier to write backends.
I can totally imagine a world where people write the more important parts of their apps in Purescript, and then compile down whatever language they use in their own ecosystem.