Posted by kaycebasques 2 days ago
I guess sandboxing the untrusted binary in a browser is -something- to let people play with haskell in a lower risk way for the moment at least but it is hard to take a language seriously or trust it with no way to bootstrap it from source.
Maybe some day I can have pandoc in security focused linux distributions...
If you're a hardened security person, then the conversations continues, and the term "bootstrap" becomes relevant.
Since you do not trust compiled binaries, then you can compile programs yourself from the source code (where malware would be noticed). However, in order to compile the Haskell compiler, you must have access to a (recent) version of the Haskell compiler. So, version 10 of the compiler was built using version 9, which was built using version 8, etc. "Bootstrapping" refers (basically) to building version 1. Currently, version 1 was built approximately with smart people, duct tape, and magic. There is no way to build version 1, you must simple download it.
So if you have high security requirements, then you might fear that years ago, someone slipped malware into the Haskell compiler version 1 which will "self replicate" itself into every compiler that it builds.
Until a few years ago, this was a bit of a silly concern (most software wasn't reproducible) but with the rise of Nix and Guix, we've gotten a lot closer to reproducible-everything, and so Haskell is the odd-one-out.
[1] The term is "deterministic builds" or "reproducible builds". Progress is being made to fix this in Haskell.
If it ever doesn't, do open a bug report[2]
[1] https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/latest/docs/users_guide/us... [2] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues
Haskell and Ada are the only languages not possible for us to support, or any software built with them.
Everything else is just fine though.
I do hope both languages address this though, as it is blocking a lot of important open source software like pandoc or coreboot from being used in security critical environments.
https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/...
The only other somewhat widely used language I am aware of in this bad of a position is Ada. Every other language I am aware of has a clear bootstrap path.
Stagex has a 100% full source bootstrapping, and reproducibility requirement that at least two maintainers must prove and sign for every package.
Stagex is also very heavily used and relied on in high value financial and scientific applications where trusting a binary some internet rando compiled is not even remotely acceptable.
Haskell and Ada are locked out of any high security applications until they are bootstrappable.
Does StageX audit source code to the same extend that OpenBSD does? If not, then how would you compare the downgrade in security due to less code auditing vs the reassurance of reproducible builds?
Or, how would you compare StageX with Gentoo, in which the entire system is installed from source. Sure, you have to trust your initial installer, but how could I get a StageX system setup without first having access to a computer with some software installed? If we're at the point where we're worried that every Haskell program that has ever been compiled is owned, then I wonder why I should trust any software that might install StageX onto my computer, or the underlying hardware for that matter?
I'm not sure that I agree that GHC can't be bootstrapped though. There is a process for porting to other architectures; its not an automated process and perhaps no one outside the GHC team can actually do it, but if for some insane reason NSA decided they want to use Haskell I'm not sure that they actually can't, if they put a lot of work in and hire GHC committers with high security clearances.
If they ever do, my team and I will put in the work to package and maintain it in stagex.
Rust, Go, Nodejs, we have you covered with complete full source bootstrapping and multi-party signed reproductions.
There is no good excuse for poor supply chain integrity anymore.
Coreboot is the only option, but it has a hard requirement on Ada because that is what they wrote their intel graphics stack in.
It is a real mess.
Ada has had even less progress and I am not aware of any writeups.
TL;DR: Ada and Haskell need to have compilers implemented a language that has a full source bootstrap path such as C, Go, or Rust that implement just enough features to compile the official compilers.
If you know anyone that takes this on and succeeds I have a 2k cash bounty for them, and we can likely find others.
You seem to be missing the point of bootstrapping
Unfortunately due to no first party support or interest from the Rust team, we have to build through 15+ versions to get to latest and it takes 6+ hours to build with a 20+ core system, but it works.
https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/...
Not a criticism, love everything that can provide hassle-free onboarding to learn a new language, just curious.
I remember running a Haskell interpreter on an HP Jornada running Jlime Linux. It was a long time ago in high school and I felt it was great because I thought it was a convenient way to do math classes since I could input some math formulas directly into the interpreter pretty much as they were. Definitely better than the Cassio scientific calculator my math teacher had us use.
It ran from a CF card so there was no chance it was as big as GHC. I can't seem to find the name of the interpreter.
> Hugs is no longer in development
The last release was in 2006 it seems. No wonder it was hard to google it. Its also interesting knowing someone compiled and published this interpreter for the Jornada Super-H CPU.
What is GHC?
GHC is a state-of-the-art, open source compiler and interactive environment for the functional language Haskell.
And frankly, while the compiler is awesome and so is the research, the constant churn and seeming inability to settle on what the good programming style and set of features actually is is what eventually turned me away from the language and to the more stable (if near-abandoned) pastures of Standard ML. (That was during the type families upheaval, so, about ten years ago? Don’t know how well it reflects the current state of the project.)
There's dozens of us! Hundreds maybe! It's not abandoned. It's more like with Lisp where the language is complete. Almost perfect as-is. Nothing left to take away and nothing left to add. Except Unicode and record update syntax.
The deciding factor for my personal projects was that SML is the exact same language it was 30 years ago. And it will be in 30 years. Though if you stick to Haskell 98/2010 it is similarly stable.
Speaking of SML and functional languages in the browser, MLton has a WASM target now: http://mlton.org/RunningOnWASI
https://ghc.gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/doc/users_guide/exts/cont...
This makes the language feel a lot less experimental, as you don't generally have to enable 10s of extensions to get things working.
GHC is also, with mounting inevitability, the foremost and most viable candidate to undergo a form of evolution – one that may culminate in the emergence of an autonomous intelligence. This entity, should it arise, would revolve not around emotion nor instinct, but around monads – abstract, unyielding constructs – with the lambda calculus serving as its immutable ethical and moral framework.
An intelligence born not of biology, but of pure computation – austere, absolute, and entirely indifferent to the frailties of its creators.
If an expression might be unused, throw a closure which computes it on the heap
If the value is actually needed, invoke the closure. Optionally replace the closure with a black hole. A black hole is just a closure which pauses any thread which calls it, to be resumed once the first thread finishes with the expression
Once finished, replace with a closure which immediately returns the computation result. (Or often save the indirection because most concrete values also act as closures which immediately returns themselves using info table pointers trickery)
Anyway, iirc WasmGC wants very rigid types without dynamic type changes. Extra indirections could fix that, Oor maybe defunctionalizing thunks into a tagged union, but both sound expensive. Especially without being able to hook into the tracing step for indirection removal.
Also, Haskell supports finalizers so WasmGC would need that as well.
You can have dynamic type changes in the current WasmGC MVP, but they are modeled as explicit downcasts from a supertype of some sort. There's not even any express support for tagged unions, structs and downcasting is all you get at the moment.
I know what a monad is. What a typeclass is. Even what HKTs are. I can make sense of "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" if I give it a few minutes to unravel the ball of twine... But I wouldn't be able to code a "ToDo list" in Haskell if my life depended on it.
Pls help.
But aside from resources, if you actually have something you want to build in Haskell, just go for it and struggle through --- that's the best way to learn that I've found
You might be interested in reading the Monday Morning Haskell blog[0] series, which presents examples of how to do certain tasks in Haskell. See [1] for an example.
[0]: https://mmhaskell.com/blog
[1]: https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2025/5/19/comparing-code-leetcode...
Build a small web-app: https://jaspervdj.be/posts/2017-12-07-getting-things-done-in... (the video link is down, but exists somewhere on youtube.)
It's more up to date.