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

[Ross Paterson]

Claus,

Sorry to be so late (I'm sure everyone else was on time), but here's
a revised Hugs entry.

Ross
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Project Status: Stable, actively maintained, volunteers welcome

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

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 and the recent addition of FFI
support, 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.

Sven Panne intends to modernize the configuration system, which is
currently creaking with age, and duplicates parts of the fptools
configuration system.

The manpower available for Hugs development and maintenance is very
limited.  Former maintainers Sigbjorn Finne and Jeffrey Lewis are now
very busy with other things, but help out when they can.  Alastair Reid
has also been very busy in the last 6 months.

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/