Home

What is Frege?

Frege is a non-strict, pure functional programming language in the spirit of Haskell. It enjoys a strong static type system with type inference. Higher rank types are supported, though type annotations are required for that.

Frege programs are compiled to Java and run in a JVM. Existing Java Classes and Methods can be used seamlessly from Frege.

The Frege programming language is named after and in honor of Gottlob Frege. (This is surprisingly hard for english speakers to pronounce, but you can use this translator page to get it right. Just click the audio symbol in the left (german) part.)

Motivation

There have been attempts to port Haskell to the JVM, though said projects seem failed or stuck. The common wisdom suggests that it is not easily possible.

Frege is thought as a substitute for this missing GHC port. While not derived from any existing Haskell implementation, it is more or less equivalent to Haskell 2010. Please see the wiki page that details the differences.

Project State The compiler, an Eclipse plugin and a provisional version of the documentation can be downloaded. Note that Frege requires JDK 7 to compile and run programs.

The compiler and the documentation tool are quite stable, the documentation provisional and the library is evolving. It already supports important parts of the Haskell 2010 standard library.

See the Getting Started page for getting started at the command-line or read the Eclipse plugin page.

Contributions

If you are interested in contributing, here are some hot topics:

write frege code to support more of the Java API create a nicer logo port Haskell libraries or tools open issues on the Issues page if you find bugs, errors in documentation, etc. vote for Enhancement issues you consider most important by "starring" them or create new ones.

Contact

You can contact the project members through the discussion group devoted to the Frege programming language. Specific programming problems are best solved on Stack Overflow, we check questions tagged "frege" on a regular basis. If you find a bug, please let us know by opening an issue in the issue tracker. (You'll need a google account to do this.)

News

Whenever a new release is available, there may be backward compatibilty issues, please check them out.

2012-4-04 release 3.19.112 with enhancements/changes in compiler, language, libraries and fregIDE
2012-2-06 fregIDE with outline view, standard library enhancements
2012-1-10 First version of fregIDE. Also a binary compatible frege3.18.120 jar.
2012-1-06 Uploaded frege3.18.110 with small language changes and enhancements
2011-12-18 Uploaded frege3.18.70.jar, which conntains fixes for Issue 19 and Issue 20
2011-11-20 Release 3.18.0 uploaded, see backward compatibilty
2011-11-11 The "Differences from Haskell" document is now a wiki page.
2011-10-21 Prelude re-structured, Show is Haskell compatible, see Releases
2011-10-15 enhancements in import, documentation tool
2011-10-01 Fixed issue 14 with r185
2011-9-29 Fixed issue 8 , issue 10 , issue 12 and issue 13 in frege3.17.184.jar
2011-9-27 Fixed issue 7 and issue 9 in frege3.17.178.jar
2011-9-26 small cosmetic changes, Language.pdf now in Portrait-1-column format
2011-9-22 switch to Haskell style comment syntax
2011-9-20 frege-jar with fork/join support uploaded
2011-9-18 Some issues fixed.
2011-9-15 Now downloadable: generated html documentation (javadocs of the runtime + frege module docs)