A Portable VM-based implementation Platform for non-strict Functional Programming Languages

The Web has become a paramount deployment platform for computer applications. Modern Web applications require execution of code on both server- and client-side. For the client-side JavaScript is the more-or-less default platform for execution of code. Users of Functional Programming languages like Haskell and Clean, who want to develop their software completely in these languages, are forced to rely on dedicated methods to transform their code to something that can be executed on top of JavaScript. In this paper we introduce a Virtual Machine that is capable of efficient execution of bytecode generated by a compiler for a non-strict intermediate functional language. The virtual machine has several implementations supporting the same bytecode, including JavaScript and asm.js versions. In this way we obtain a portable execution platform for non-strict Functional languages with a better client-side performance than existing client-side execution platforms.