[Haskell-cafe] My experience setting up Haskell up for GUI development

[Andrew Coppin]

Ben Arnold wrote:
> So, in practice, do other people write GUI apps with Haskell on 
> Windows? And if they do, how do they do it? I feel I've got to the 
> stage where I need a concrete recommendation from the experts.

Yeah, this kind of thing is annoyingly common in Haskell circles. It's 
not insurmountable though.

wxHaskell has been "dead" for a while. It recently came back to life, 
but I imagine it's still a little dusty round the edges. [FWIW, I'm 
really happy to see this being revived! I've never used it, but I've 
heard good things about it...]

I do all my work with Gtk2hs. Yes, GTK isn't very common on Windows. But 
it seems to work the nicest. There's an on-going problem though that 
each release of Gtk2hs only works with one (or maybe two) releases of 
GHC, and every time a new release of GHC comes out, you gotta wait a 
while before Gtk2hs catches up. However, the installer usually *tells* 
you that's the problem; what you're seeing sounds more like the 
installer program doesn't like Vista. I can't offer any help in that 
direction, unfortunately...

As for your program crashing when run twice, wxWidgets probably doesn't 
like being initialised twice. I've never used wxHaskell, and I don't 
know how your program is structured, but if you can avoid initialising 
the library twice, you could be able to rerun the core of your program 
over and over. Otherwise you're kind of stuck with the tedious 
edit-compile-run cycle.