Unix/Linux support of Haskell
Sean Russell
Groups, which is (for some reason) not letting me "reply" to threads.
To add insult to injury, the posting form refuses to let me prepend a
"Re:" to the subject line.
Anyway, I'm *very* new to functional languages. I took the mandatory
Scheme course in college and hated it, and would (probably) have
flunked an ML course had not the teacher graded on a curve. I started
with imperative languages in 1984, switched to OO around 1990, and
only recently started playing with Haskell.
Ok, that's the disclaimer. As pertains to this thread, I have two
subjective observations regarding Haskell and Unix: NHC98 is a better
environment if you want a portable build system. It builds on Solaris
much more easily than GHC (which requires libreadline, which isn't
standard on Solaris).
My anecdote regards a small project that I started at work using
Haskell and GHC, GHC because that's what DARCS (the source control
system that got me interested in Haskell in the first place) uses as
its build system. When I went to build the app on Solaris 8 (where it
ultimately lives), I got nothing but heartache from GHC. Even after I
got a working GHC, the binaries that it compiled inevitably
segfaulted.
So I went out and grabbed an NHC98 binary, and everything compiled
beautifully. Furthermore, the binaries created are consistently 1/3
the size of the GHC binaries. I suspect that GHC compiles more
speed-efficient code, but from a path-of-least-resistance POV, NHC98
is a better system for non-Linux systems. NHC98 works fine on Linux,
as well, but GHC builds equally easily there.
Ketil Malde
> Ok, that's the disclaimer. As pertains to this thread, I have two
> subjective observations regarding Haskell and Unix: NHC98 is a better
> environment if you want a portable build system.
Ah. I've only tried NHC once, on an SGI Altix. It built fine, but
crashed, since it's not 64bit clean. (And now that GHC finally
supports IA64, I no longer have access to the machine...sigh) So
while I'm glad you found NHC to be suitable for your needs, I'd rather
say that they are differently portable. :-)
> It builds on Solaris much more easily than GHC (which requires
> libreadline, which isn't standard on Solaris).
I could have sworn you could compile it without? Anyway, readline
isn't all that hard to find, is it?
Anyway, good luck with Haskell, and feel free to check out the mailing
lists, wiki and documentation (I think all can be found from
http://haskell.org)
-kzm
--
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
Sean Russell
Ketil Malde <ke...@ii.uib.no> wrote in message news:<egzncfx...@sefirot.ii.uib.no>...
...
> supports IA64, I no longer have access to the machine...sigh) So
> while I'm glad you found NHC to be suitable for your needs, I'd rather
> say that they are differently portable. :-)
Yeah, I can imagine. Well, as I said -- and at the risk of being
redundant -- my anecdote was admittedly limited in scope. It isn't as
if I've done an empirical tests of the compilers. I only know that
NHC98 has been operating flawlessly for me across several OS versions:
Solaris 8 and 9, a not-young Redhat 8.0, and a bleeding-edge Gentoo.
> I could have sworn you could compile it without? Anyway, readline
> isn't all that hard to find, is it?
Perhaps. And I did install readline, which was a minor chore in
itself. As I said, I *did* get it compiled on Solaris 8; it just
produced binaries that invariably segfaulted.
> Anyway, good luck with Haskell, and feel free to check out the mailing
> lists, wiki and documentation (I think all can be found from
> http://haskell.org)
Thanks. haskell.org has been a real godsend, although I find myself
wishing for a mechanism for searching for a given library. Sort of a
"what-provides" feature, although a simple htdig interface would be
sufficient. As it is, since I'm not terribly familiar with the layout
of the libraries, it can take a while to locate a particular one on
haskell.org. Also, there appears to be a number of core libraries
that aren't in the prelude and also aren't directly accessible via the
"Part II: Libraries" section. Or, maybe I'm misunderstanding them,
and they aren't core libraries, but are extensions. Like Network.URI,
and so on.
I've been spoiled by a tool for Ruby called 'ri'. You call it with a
name, and it matches the name against the core classes and methods and
returns descriptions for whatever matches.