deploy-hint VS binaryen

The fact that a ghc installation is needed at runtime is indeed a weak point of the library, but I want to point out that hint is not calling the ghc executable at runtime, it is calling the ghc library, which in turn assumes the presence of a bunch of files on your machine. The easiest way to get those files on your machine is to install ghc, but it's not the only way! I have a proof of concept demonstrating how it is possible to bundle those files with your project so that your end users don't have to install ghc themselves. That proof of concept was recently extended to a real world use case in https://tidalcycles.org/; /u/yaxu, did that end up working? Is there anything you or I could do to make it easier for the next person to apply those ideas to their project?

I've encountered a building problem when using asterius to compile a multi-packages cabal project, the detail could be found here, any suggestions?

ghcjs is the way to go for you, and soon it might be asterius. i do not know how hard it is to set ghcjs up without a framework. but frameworks like obelisk (based on reflex-dom), shpadoinkle, and miso automate that for. i personally like obelisk for its functional reactive programming but it can get awkward and get in your way. so if gui programming is just a means to the end of this one small application and you are not really interested in it nor functional reactive programming, shpadoinkle or miso might suit you better. miso implements the elm architecture (also "TEA", "functional model view controller") and shpadoinkle implements something directly equivalent to the elm architecture. but shpadoinkle achieves more composable widgets by minimalizing the elm architecture. so i recommend shpadoinkle for its better concept although miso is more mature.

Also, hint uses unsafeCoerce, and thus implicitly relies on an assumption about how values are represented at runtime. Namely, if a program P is interpreting an expression E of type A, hint assumes that the value of type A produced by the ghc interpreter has the same representation as the values of type A which are manipulated by program P. This is not guaranteed to be the case, since P has been compiled by the compiler portion of ghc while E has been evaluated by the interpreter portion of ghc. This means the ghc devs had to carefully craft their compiler and interpreters to match. When targetting the browser, a Haskell-to-js or Haskell-to-wasm compiler such as Asterius modifies ghc's code-generator so it produces js or wasm code. You would thus also need to tweak the interpreter so that it produces js or wasm values which match what the modified code-generator outputs. Or you could restrict yourself to the hint's less expressive eval :: String -> String API.

We found a post where someone had a similar issue (here), but the fix in that issue doesn't help: using `ar` from `binutils` causes link errors like this instead:

https://github.com/tweag/asterius/issues/851 (asterius has a demo, but no source, and I -assume no lua filter support)

All modern ones support Haskell: https://github.com/tweag/asterius

Another option is Asterius. I'm not familiar with the current state, and it's not had active development for about 3 months now, either, so it may be in the same boat? But I think the big disadvantage of Asterius is that there's just a lot less usage, and therefore a lot less testing with the whole Haskell ecosystem, versus GHCJS which has been a fixture for a while and where loads of people have thought about compatibility for years.

Check out asterius

I've played around with Haskell via the Asteruis project : https://github.com/tweag/asterius

Also emscripten of course, for C/C++.