Haskell andWebAssembly

When writing code, different programming languages offer various approaches to solve a problem. Some of those problems might be elegantly solved in one programming language, but challenging in a different one. When it comes to the Web, interactive client-applications rely only on JavaScript. With the introduction of WebAssembly, this limitation has fallen. This article gives some thoughts, why it can be useful to write applications for the Web in another language than JavaScript, and it provides an introduction, on how to compile Haskell code to WebAssembly with the Haskell-to-WebAssembly-Compiler Asterius. It shows an approach how to compile a full Haskell application, as well as making single Haskell functions available in JavaScript. It can be challenging, when it comes to the interaction between a strictly typed language, like Haskell, and the dynamically typed language JavaScript. Based on examples, the article gives insight into this challenge, and its solution provided by Asterius