Imagine you had an excellent successful Kickstarter campaign, and during it a lot of people asked for an Android port to be made of the software. Which is written in Haskell. No problem, you'd think -- the user interface can be written as a local webapp, which will be nicely platform agnostic and so make it easy to port. Also, it's easy to promise a lot of stuff during a Kickstarter campaign. Keeps the graph going up. What could go wrong?

So, rather later you realize there is no Haskell compiler for Android. At all. But surely there will be eventually. And so you go off and build the webapp. Since Yesod seems to be the pinnacle of type-safe Haskell web frameworks, you use it. Hmm, there's this Template Haskell stuff that it uses a lot, but it only makes compiles a little slow, and the result is cool, so why not.

Then, about half-way through the project, it seems time to get around to this Android port. And, amazingly, a Haskell compiler for Android has appeared in the meantime. Like the Haskell community has your back. (Which they generally seem to.) It's early days and rough, lots of libraries need to be hacked to work, but it only takes around 2 weeks to get a port of your program that basically works.

But, no webapp. Cause nobody seems to know how to make a cross-compiling Haskell compiler do Template Haskell. (Even building a fully native compiler on Android doesn't do the trick. Perhaps you missed something though.)

At this point you can give up and write a separate Android UI (perhaps using these new Android JNI bindings for Haskell that have also appeared in the meantime). Or you can procrastinate for a while, and mull it over; consider rewriting the webapp to not use Yesod but some other framework that doesn't need Template Haskell.

Eventually you might think this: If I run ghc -ddump-splices when I'm building my Yesod code, I can see all the thousands of lines of delicious machine generated Haskell code. I just have to paste that in, in place of the Template Haskell that generated it, and I'll get a program I can build on Android! What could go wrong?

And you even try it, and yeah, it seems to work. For small amounts of code that you paste in and carefully modify and get working. Not a whole big, constantly improving webapp where every single line of html gets converted to types and lambdas that are somehow screamingly fast.

So then, let's automate this pasting. And so the EvilSplicer is born!

That's a fairly general-purpose Template Haskell splicer. First do a native build with -ddump-splices output redirected to a log file. Run the EvilSplicer to fix up the code. Then run an Android cross-compile.

But oh, the caveats. There are so many ways this can go wrong..

The first and most annoying problem you'll encounter is that often Template Haskell splices refer to hidden symbols that are not exported from the modules that define the splices. This lets the splices use those symbols, but prevents them being used in your code. This does not seem like a good part of the Template Haskell design, to be honest. It would be better if it required all symbols used in splices to be exported. But it can be worked around. Just use trial and error to find every Haskell library that does this, and then modify them to export all the symbols they use. And after each one, rebuild all libraries that depend on it. You're very unlikely to end up with more than 9 thousand lines of patches. Because that's all it took me..

The next problem (and the next one, and the next ...) is that while GHC's code output by -dump-splices (and indeed, by GHC error messages, etc) looks like valid Haskell code to the casual viewer, it's often not. To start with, it often has symbols qualified with the package and module name. ghc-prim:GHC.Types.: does not work well where code originally contained : . And then there's fun with multi-line strings, which sometimes cannot be parsed back in by GHC in the form it outputs them. And then there's the strange way GHC outputs case expressions, which is not valid Haskell at all. (It's missing some semicolons.) Oh, and there's the lambda expressions that GHC outputs with insufficient parentheses, leading to type errors at compile time. And so much more fun. Enough fun to give one the idea that this GHC output has never really been treated as code that could be run again. Because that would be a dumb thing to need to do.

Just to keep things interesting, the Haskell libraries used by your native GHC and your Android GHC need to be pretty much identical versions. Maybe a little wiggle room, but any version skew could cause unwanted results. Probably, most of the time, unwanted results in the form of a 3 screen long type error message. (My longest GHC error message seen on this odyessy was actually a full 500+ kilobytes in size. It included the complete text of Jquery and Bootstrap. At times like these you notice that GHC outputs its error messages o.n.e . c.h.a.r.a.c.t.e.r . a.t . a . t.i.m.e.)

Anyway, if you struggle with it, or pay me vast quantities of money, your program will, eventually, link. And that's all I can promise for now.

PS, I hope nobody will ever find this blog post useful in their work.

PPS, Also, if you let this put you off Haskell in any way .. well, don't. You just might want to wait a year or so before doing Haskell on Android.