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Comment by radmuzom | Hacker News Reader

This is a great and a balanced list. I have definitely enjoyed some time spent programming in Haskell.

One frustration that I have had while dabbling in Haskell is that some libraries in Hackage assume a GNU/Linux kind of system. For example, I was reading Simon Marlow's book and while trying to compile the examples in a Windows machine, a particular library could not be installed because of the lack of 'configure' (GNU autotools? I only use Windows nowadays due to professional reasons and have not used GNU/Linux last 11 years). I hope that library authors do not make such assumptions unless it really necessary.

Is there an opportunity for a company to create an implementation of Haskell which fixes some commonly mentioned problems (e.g. stop the world GC) - like proprietary JVM vendors? Is it even technically feasible? Of course, such a hypothetical company would also need to spend a lot of time writing useful libraries.

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I'm a Haskell Windows user (and an Idris developer), and I have little trouble installing most things (except those directly targeted at Linux). That's not because I'm awesome, but because there's a trick to it. The trick is to install msys2 (https://msys2.github.io), and do the installs from there. Set up its libs and include as extra dirs in Cabal's config. When you need some lib or build tool look for it with pacman -Ss and install it. To start with installing make and autoconf helps you over the configure hurdle.

And if you hit Cabal hell now and then, that happens to everybody so it's probably not because you're on Windows, just make a sandbox and see if it works there.

My Idris installation instructions: https://github.com/idris-lang/Idris-dev/wiki/Idris-on-Window...

It's an example of pulling down build tools and libs (well, a lib) with msys2.

I don't mean to trivialize the complexities and importance of setting up a development environment you are happy with, but Linux is very easily available to a Windows user via virtualbox VMs or boot2docker. Are you sure you can't find a workflow involving those that you're happy with? Editing files doesn't have to use an editor in the VM.

Do you mind explaining what a natural workflow for this would look like? Is it to SSH into the VM using your editor of choice?

You can keep doing everything all the coding that you've doing on the windows side. Just set up a shared folder which will instantly update the virtual box. Keep one terminal tab open that's ssh'd into the box, and just switch over to that tab when you want to run anything.

I do this, e.g. drop box on the VM and host

Thanks.

I've heard the GHC on Windows situation improved a lot with:

https://github.com/fpco/minghc

Myself I don't use Windows, so verify the claims. But might be worth to give it another try.

Also Stack[1] has made it lots easier to get rolling on that platform.

1: https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack

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