ANNOUNCE: GHC version 6.6.1

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2007-04-30 at 11:02 +0400, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Duncan,
> 
> Monday, April 30, 2007, 10:11:09 AM, you wrote:
> 
> >> how ghc/mingw can be used with java? :)
> 
> > I expect it's quite tricky! :-)
> 
> > I'm not claiming it works or is easy, I was just commenting that making
> 
> so, you agree that 99% of foreign-language libs that can be used with
> ghc/mingw are written either in C or C++?

But if you're using this to argue that we should ship a C++ compiler
then it's just a circular argument. If we only ship a C compiler then
99% of foreign language libs that are easily usable with ghc/mingw are
written in C. If we ship perl and python and whatever compilers then the
foreign language libs that are easily usable would be in a wider range
of languages.

Remember that you don't even need a C compiler for ghc to be able to use
C apis (or C apis exported from C++ libs).

It's just not modular to bundle them all together. You can quite easily
install a C, C++, Java or Pascal compiler and use that to build libs
that export C apis and then use ghc (or any other Haskell impl) to use
those apis.

Duncan