On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 07:43:57AM +0300, Lars Engblom wrote:
> Even though I am using GHC almost daily, I agree it is a pile of junk. I
> still wonder how you are going to manage to keep Haskell but not having
> GHC anymore.
I won't. What I meant with "this is not about Haskell but about
ghc" was that it's not the programming language but the (almost)
only usable implementation that causes trouble.
> As far as I know there are only two Haskell compilers actively developed
> except for GHC: UHC and JHC. The other implementations are not
> maintained anymore. These two will probably not work well with xmonad
> and xmobar (I am a user of both also). Hugs (already in ports) is not a
> good alternative as it is not even maintained upstream anymore.
I doubt that any usefull hs-port today is even buildable with
anything else than ghc (or some hpothetical implementation which
includes some of the ghc extensions).
> Sometimes piles of junk are kept in a system because the alternatives
> have not caught up.
The proper alternative would be to write some very simple, very
small, probably very slow (wrt produced binaries) Haskell compiler
in a commonly known and portable and beloved programming language
like C that implements enough ghc extensions to be usable for most
hs-ports. Or even to be used to bootstrap ghc with it (but then
you'd also had to dive into ghc and its build system).
> But on the other hand, it is your spare time and you
> do with it as you want :)
At the moment, I'm running a test-build of ghc-7.4 using ghc-7.0
bootstrapped from ghc-6.12 bootstrapped from ghc-6.10 boostrapped
from 6.6 bootstrapped from nothing but a (still machine and os
dependent) .hc file bundle on amd64 running inside qemu on the
desktop pc in my office (and -- whow -- it's crappy). If this
succeeds, and if the whole process also works on i386 without too
many additional fixes, the ghc port will survive at least until the
flag day and until I start to work on an update to ghc-7.6.3 and
haskell-platform-2013.2.0.0.
Ciao,
Kili
