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Haskell on Windows

gundersen.net

55 pointsfegu30 comments

I made this submission myself (it is my own blog). The issues in this blog post took some time to solve, and was not obvious at the outset. I hope it can help others new to Haskell.

Have you tried the chocolatey package?

I have not tried that, but most of the issues I address (if not all) would still be present since a packager/installer can't address them - only changes in the Haskell Platform itself can address these issues.

You should file some tickets with the Haskell platform folks. Some of these problems are beyond the scope of what HP can / should do, but HP, like many other bits of the Haskell ecosystem are entirely volunteer driven.

I filed one with the ekg-maintainer and try to folow the development. Hopefully, the cabal path issue is solved when 2013.02 comes out.

So you want the Haskell platform install to edit your path variables? Write a patch and ask the Haskell platform folks if they'd merge it in. It's all open source. The best way to fix simple things is to fix them and send in a patch.

I am a Windows user but I am seriously considering buying a small mac computer (maybe macbook air but I want more ram) for open-source development. It's no surprise that today, many tools, many functional languages work best on Linux and MacOS. All the screencasts I watched recently were on MacOSX. I tried many things to have it both ways : VMWARE with Ubuntu : X Server crashes every time when I use the browser VMWARE with Mint/Fedora : Crashes before that VMWARE with MacOSX : The whole thing went into a crashing loop after 10 minutes.

Back to my snappy W7 I am.

Me too, as much as I dislike the half-eaten apple, MacOSX is a great product. It even beat FreeBSD to having DTrace support switched on by default.

I just bought a Macbook Air. 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. Seems snappy enough for me.

How much did you pay?

Why does it matter?

The 11-inch with 1.7GHz i5 with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD goes for $1,399.

The 13-inch with 1.8GHz i5 and the same RAM/SSD goes for $1,499.

Yes, there are cheaper laptops out there. I'm happy with the fit&finish, the operating system and the support I've gotten from Apple, both online and in the store.

Hey, sorry I just saw this. All together it came to just over $1600. Also, my MBA has an i7 processor.

If you're primary use will be OSS development then you're best bet is to buy a cheap PC and throw Debian on it. I'd go with the testing branch, which, despite the name, is very stable.

In my experience it's a lot easier to use existing OSS code on Linux than it is on OSX. OSX is a lot better than Windows, but I found I spend a lot of time on OSX debugging weird library problems and trying to get dependencies installed. A common problem is that I'll be trying to build/install a library, but it'll have a prereq that isn't met because Apple included an ancient version of it. Fink and MacPorts help a bit, but at that point it you might as well just install Linux, since they're basically emulating the various Linux package management systems, but they don't integrate with the OS very well.

On Debian I "apt-get install" the -dev package for the library I want to use, and everything works. And on the rare occasion a library isn't available through apt-get, building from source is almost always as easy as "./configure && make && sudo make install". Sometimes that'll work on OSX, sometimes it won't.

In the meantime you might want to try Linux or OSX in VirtualBox first. Sounds like your VMWare installation might be broken.

Mac ports and Fink? Apparently 2008 called and they want their stuff back.

Okay, I admit I haven't tried very hard to setup OSX for OSS development lately.

But at the same time you're making my point. I don't have to worry about it on Linux - I use my distro's built in package manager and it just works. On OSX you have to figure it out yourself.

I use both MacPorts and Fink regularly on all of my Macs and they both work well.

Homebrew is a much more active and easier to use than MacPorts or Fink. MacPorts, in particular, requires building all dependencies from source, even if equivalent OSX libraries are on your machine.

http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/

Note that there are a lot of ruby and rails devs on mac, for ruby/rails you might actually have less friction on a mac.

Screencasts using textpad, Notifications using growl, etc.

I'm a big windows user and honestly, quite the fan to. But Linux really does look like it makes a lot of development easier so here's what I've been considering.

I'm going to make a vagrant VM with chef, possibly arch but I don't think I'm up to configuring it. Add that VHD to my boot list so i can ssh into the box for a lot of what i want and to really try it out just reboot into it for the full gui environment.

It'll be interesting to see if linux will handle changing the hardware back and forth like that.

It shouldn't run into problems with changing hardware. I keep an Ubuntu install on a thumbdrive, and am able to boot into it on every computer I have tried, without noticing any issues.

Use virtual box and debian stable/testing. Solid as a rock. Forget VMware - its a pain in the arse. Make sure you are on 64 bit windows.

I have to remain a windows user as I have a ton of stuff written in visual c++ that is at least 10-16 years old which I need to support (30 year support contracts rock :))

My main workstation is a 5 year old Lenovo T61 with a Samsung 840 pro and its as fast as any new machine at 1/10th of the costs.

My experiences with macos x have been disastrous - its just about the hardest thing to get anything to build on and that includes dragging 15 year old c++ stuff onto 64 bit windows.

I followed your advice. I've been working for 1 hour successfully!! I used this and saved a lot of setting up time : http://virtualboxes.org/images/debian/

also http://pascalcula.blogspot.com/2011/10/setting-up-linux-on-w...

Curious to hear more about why VMware is a pain. I go back and myself.

VMware tools is a pain to recompile every damn kernel drop whereas Debian ships and installs VirtualBox guest stuff automatically.

Also it's heavier, more expensive and slower from a UI perspective.

Thank you.

You might considering trying PC-BSD (or FreeBSD) under VirtualBox. I'm using FreeBSD 9.1-STABLE (32-bit) with VirtualBox on Windows 7 x64 and found it to be a very good combination, and much "snappier" than Ubuntu.

There is also a significant number of Haskell users who develop on FreeBSD -- enough that they maintain their own special ports tree for Cabal packages:

https://github.com/freebsd-haskell/freebsd-haskell

I also recently added F# 3.0 to the FreeBSD ports tree, and have found the F# 3.0 + Mono 3.0.x + FreeBSD to be a very nice development/hosting environment:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/fsharp-o...

Is it any easier to write gui code on windows now? I remember trying to write stuff with gtk a few years ago and it was incredibly painful to get anything to work.

The gtk bindings are easily installable with cabal install these days, so it's way easier now. Just download one of the all-inclusive GTK bundles, add the bin dir to the path, then 'cabal install gtk2hs-buildtools' and 'cabal install gtk'.

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