The future of Functional programming

Question

Joel Spolsky praise compiled version of program. How are with the functional programming? What are compilers for functional languages?

Answer 1

This post is really quite unclear. The question appears to be "Are there compilers for functional languages which can produce native executables without the need to install additional software?"

The answer, generally, is yes. For example, Haskell has a compiler that produces native binaries. Many other functional languages have similar compilers.

Answer 2

Yeah, also:

ocamlc is the bytecode compiler, and ocamlopt is the native code compiler. GCL compiles Common Lisp to native binaries.

There isn't anything for F# since, for what I am aware of, .NET doesn't have a native compiler, like Joel mentions. Actually, CSML can be used to call C# from ocaml, uhh, not sure if you can compile this down to byte code --it doesn't seem likely-- although the documentation alludes to it, yet it is very incomplete.

Answer 3

PLT Scheme has got a JIT compiler.

Stalin is a Scheme compiler which does ridiculously aggressive optimisation.

All Common Lisp implementations that I know of except CLISP compile to native code. (Whether one ought to consider CL a functional language depends on what is meant by the term “functional”, however.)

MLton is a highly optimising compiler for Standard ML.

Functional languages can be and have for some time been compiled very effectively. There is no difference to imperative languages in this regard.