Sunroof: A monadic DSL for generating JavaScript

Abstract

Sunroof is a Haskell-hosted Domain Specific Language (DSL) for generating JavaScript. The central feature of Sunroof is a JavaScript monad, which, like the Haskell IO-monad, allows access to external resources, but specifically JavaScript resources. As such, Sunroof is primarily a feature-rich foreign-function API to the browser's JavaScript engine, and all the browser-specific functionality, including HTML-based rendering, event handling, and drawing to the HTML5 canvas element. In this paper, we give the design and implementation of Sunroof. Using monadic reification, we generate JavaScript from a deep embedding of the JavaScript monad. The Sunroof DSL has the feel of native Haskell, with a simple Haskell-based type schema to guide the Sunroof programmer. Furthermore, because we are generating code, we can offer Haskell-style concurrency patterns, such as MVars and Channels. In combination with a web-services package, the Sunroof DSL offers a robust platform to build interactive web applications. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.