Offer to help with WinHugs

[Ross Paterson]

On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 02:14:57PM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> I've been using WinHugs for a few years now. I notice that the 2005
> release does not contain Windows binaries, which I think is a shame,
> because its a very nice environment for developing in (particularly
> WinHugs). I am volunteering to get WinHugs building, compiled, and to
> create an installer for it (as much as I can). I have years of
> experience in Haskell and C++.

Your help will be very welcome.

> I have already checked out the CVS source for Hugs, and have the GUI
> popping up (before failing to load the prelude, but I'm sure thats
> minor).

To make this work, you need to build the libraries (including
the Prelude).  Currently the only way to do this is with one of
the Unix-like environments for Windows.  I'd recommend MSYS + MinGW
(http://www.mingw.org/).  You also need to check out fptools/libraries
and fptools/hslibs under your hugs source directory.  Then 'make' in
the top-level directory should build the interpreter and libraries.
There may well be glitches with that step, but hopefully easily fixed.
Then you'll have libraries that can be used with your WinHugs build.

Hugs has recently switched to using Cabal to build its libraries.
If Cabal worked properly on Windows, it might be possible to build them
without the Unix-like environment, but that's another task.