Towards a Declarative Web

Owing to its platform independence, ubiquity and ease of deployment, the web browser is quickly becoming not only a platform for large-scale application development, but the platform for application development. However, the de facto standard language of the web, Javascript, suffers from poor language design, a lack of static checks and a highly verbose programming model. Meanwhile, the Haskell functional language is gaining prominence as a language well suited for writing robust applications. This thesis explores the viability of developing applications for the browser platform using Haskell. In doing so, it presents an implementation of a compiler from Haskell, including bleeding edge extensions specific to the state of the art GHC compiler, to comparatively lean Javascript code, together with a base library for writing web applications, based on Functional Reactive Programming.