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

[Ross Paterson]

[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/