Haskell Support on Windows (Simon Peyton Jones)

[Kyle Van Berendonck]

A couple of poor assumptions are made here.

The first is that the userbase of GHC on Windows is poor. This is false. In
fact, the poor state of Windows is mentioned on #haskell more frequently as
of late. In the last week I've talked almost every day to (different)
people who have had Windows woes with using GHC. The hacker-base isn't here
at the moment - I agree, but the user-base most certainly is. Could this be
a problem with the demographic, or could it just be that Windows
development isn't inviting? The build system and default test failures
in-particular are a source of discouragement.

The second assumption is that GHC/Haskell will be worth a dime in the
RealWorld without Windows as a primary tier platform. I'm going to put a
crude guess that given the overwhelming magnitude of C#/F# coming up on my
local careers portal that there's far more industry on Windows than on OSX
or Linux. Those are all the businesses where the probability that they will
ever touch Haskell goes from `probably not right now` to `impossible`. Let
me also remind you that Windows still holds 89.2% of operating system
market share ie the people that hackers and developers actually have to
deploy their applications to.

Sorry to sound fumey, but there's all this suggesting that everyone would
have a better day if we dropped Windows (let's be honest, if it wasn't a
primary tier platform nobody would have fixed it for 7.8), but I doubt few
of the people who think it's a "great idea" or sslt have actually thought
through whether it's the best thing for Haskell or just the best thing to
get 7.8 into their hands a couple weeks sooner.

Regards.
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