Special Invitation :-) HC&A Report (November 2003)

[Sigbjorn Finne]

Thanks Ross,

looks good, but the maintainer section is out-of-date. I've
hardly touched Hugs since March, so having you down as
"The Maintainer" would now be correct, really. I don't
foresee my rate of contributions to radically pick up
either (but will be happy to continue contributing, on&off.)

Same goes for Jeff, he's equally embarassed when
recognised in the street as the Hugs maintainer.

--sigbjorn

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ross Paterson" <ross at soi.city.ac.uk>
To: <cvs-hugs at haskell.org>
Cc: "C.Reinke" <C.Reinke at kent.ac.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 13:49
Subject: Re: Special Invitation :-) HC&A Report (November 2003)


> [redirected from hugs-users]
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 06:55:41PM +0000, C.Reinke wrote:
> > in case you haven't seen the calls for contributions on the main
> > Haskell list: the Haskell community hopes to hear from you about all
> > the interesting stuff you've been brewing over the last six months,
> > not to mention the even more interesting stuff in the pipeline!-)
> >
> > I'm particularly worried about Hugs being the only one of the
> > main Haskell implementations without an update so far..
>
> Here's a possible draft Hugs entry for the HC&A report.  Feel free
> to modify/rewrite/discard:
>
> Project Status: Actively maintained, stable
>
> Hugs is a very portable, easily installed Haskell-98 compliant interpreter
> that supports a wide range of type-system and runtime-system extensions
> including typed record extensions, implicit parameters, the foreign
> function interface extension and the hierarchical module namespace
> extension.
>
> Current state
>
> The Hugs98 interpreter is now maintained by Sigbjorn Finne and Jeffrey
> Lewis, both of Galois Connections, with help from Alastair Reid of Reid
> Consulting and Ross Paterson of City University, London and others.
>
> At the time of writing, a new major release of Hugs is almost ready.
>
> With this release, Hugs will rely exclusively on the Haskell hierarchical
> libraries.  This reduces the amount of Haskell code to be maintained with
> Hugs, and also increases compatibility with the other implementations.
> Coverage has also improved -- Hugs now supports imprecise exceptions
> (but not asynchronous ones), unboxed arrays and more.  Compatibility
> stubs for old libraries are also provided as a transistional measure,
> but some day these will disappear.
>
> With these library improvements, together with Hugs's long-standing
> support for various Haskell extensions, code developed with GHC can
> often be made to work with Hugs too with a little effort.  Sven Panne
> has done this with his GLUT and OpenGL packages, and we would encourage
> other developers to do the same.
>
> Interoperation with .NET (on Windows platforms), formerly a separate
> add-on, has been enhanced and is now integrated with Hugs.  You can
> instantiate and use .NET objects from within Haskell, and call and use
> Haskell functions from any .NET language.
>
> Assorted fragments of documentation have been re-organized and augmented
> as a Users's Guide describing the current state of Hugs.  It is however
> less complete than we would like in places.  Contributions are welcome.
>
> Future plans
>
> Hugs will continue to improve its coverage of the libraries.  Older
> interfaces will disappear.
>
> The manpower available for Hugs development and maintenance is limited,
> and contributions from volunteers are welcome.  For example, Dimitry
> Golubovsky <dimitry at golubovsky.org> is working on adding optional Unicode
> support to Hugs.  People who test the CVS version are also a great help.
>
> Further reading
>
> http://www.haskell.org/hugs/