[Haskell-cafe] Building Haskell stuff on Windows

Dan Licata drl at cs.cmu.edu
Thu Nov 8 08:24:07 EST 2007


On Nov08, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> | > Windows and Haskell is not a well travelled route, but if you stray of
> | > the cuddly installer packages, it gets even worse.
> |
> | But it shouldn't. Really it shouldn't. Even though Windows is not my
> | preferred platform, it is by no means different enough to warrant such
> | additional complexity. Plus, GHC is developed at Microsoft, and the
> | currently most featureful Haskell IDE is on Windows...

Over the summer, I was hacking on GHC, using a Vista machine as my
primary development box.  I was only building basic GHC and not any
extra libraries, so my scenario was less complicated than described
above.  However, here are some resources that might be useful:

- The instructions on the GHC wiki worked for me:

  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building

  Basically, you need to install mingw and msys so you can pretend
  you're on linux, and then the build is the same as on linux (you need
  binaries for a previous GHC, Happy, Alex, ...).

  Except that you need to pass a few options to ./configure, as
  described a ways down this page (I missed this the first time):
  
  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Windows

- I did find that the current darcs HEAD was more likely to be
  temporarily broken on Windows than on linux (less travelled).  I
  sometimes found it helpful to compare the behavior I saw with the
  transcript of the BuildBot:
  
  http://darcs.haskell.org/buildbot/head/

  E.g. the x86 Windows head fast build.  If you click on 'stdio', you
  get the command run for each step as well as the output.  In fact
  following along with each step of the buildbot probably isn't such a
  bad way to get GHC built in the first place if you're having trouble.

-Dan


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