Open source
Eta
A pure, lazy, statically-typed dialect of Haskell that runs on the JVM, with a strongly-typed FFI for safe Java interop.
- Haskell
- GHC
- JVM bytecode
- STG
- Compilers
Eta is a dialect of Haskell that runs on the JVM, built to combine the vast Java ecosystem with the safety and expressiveness of pure functional programming. It began as a Summer of Code project — originally named GHCVM — born from the question “Why isn’t Haskell on the JVM?”
As creator and lead developer, Rahul forked GHC, removed everything below the STG intermediate language, and built a new backend that compiles STG directly to JVM bytecode. Eta targets compatibility with GHC 7.10.3’s Haskell and ships a strongly-typed foreign function interface for safe interop with existing Java libraries.
The project grew a full toolchain — the Etlas build tool, an IntelliJ plugin, a package index — and a community of roughly 2.6k GitHub stars.