@hackage Salsa0.1.0.1

                  Salsa: a .NET bridge for Haskell

Salsa is an experimental Haskell library and code generator that allows Haskell programs to host the .NET runtime and interact with .NET libraries. It uses type families extensively to provide a type-safe mapping of the .NET object model in the Haskell type system.

What's in the package:

• 'Foreign' contains the Haskell library 'Foreign.Salsa'.

  This library provides the Haskell-side interface to Salsa, including: functions to load the .NET runtime into the process, functions for interacting with .NET classes and objects, and the required type-level machinery. It works together with the Haskell modules created by the generator (see below) to provide access to .NET classes and their members.

• 'Driver' contains the Salsa .NET driver assembly (Salsa.dll).

  The driver assembly contains .NET code that is loaded automatically by the Salsa library when the .NET runtime is loaded into the process. It provides run-time code generation facilities for calling in and out of the .NET runtime from Haskell. The assembly binary (Salsa.dll) is embedded in 'Foreign\Salsa\Driver.hs' using the 'Embed.hs' utility program.

• 'Generator' contains the Salsa binding generator.

  The generator is a C# program that creates Haskell modules from .NET metadata to provide type-safe access to the requested .NET classes and methods in .NET assembilies.

  Note: the generator requires .NET 3.5 because it uses the 'System.Linq' namespace.

• 'Samples' contains a few Haskell programs that use Salsa.

  • Hello: a basic console 'Hello World' program.

  • Weather: a console program that asynchronously downloads the Sydney weather forecast and displays it.

  • Conway: a simulator for Conway's Game of Life with a Windows Presentation Foundation GUI. (Requires .NET 3.0 or later.)

Requirements:

• GHC 6.8

  Salsa makes extensive use of type families and thus requires at least version 6.8 of GHC.

• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

  Since the Generator requires .NET 3.5, any Salsa development also requires this version. Executables produced with Salsa however will run with just .NET 2.0 (provided that only .NET 2.0 assemblies are used by the program).

  Salsa will not work with versions 1.0/1.1 of the .NET Framework, or with Mono. (Supporting Mono shouldn't be too much work though.)

Building:

Build the Salsa library using Cabal (version 1.2) as usual:

runhaskell Setup.hs configure
runhaskell Setup.hs build
runhaskell Setup.hs install

The generator, driver, and each of the samples can be built with MSBuild; just run 'msbuild' in the appropriate directory. (The msbuild binary can be found in '%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50272').

Author:

Andrew Appleyard