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

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2008-05-18 at 19:26 +0100, Ben Arnold wrote:
> I'm running Windows Vista and I've been trying to set up an
> environment for writing GUI applications.
> 
> A Google search pointed me at two major GUI toolkits for Haskell:
> gtk2hs and wxHaskell.
> 
> I started with gtk2hs. The installation instructions were
> straightfoward and easy to follow, but they just didn't work. The
> installer did nothing. It opened a command window and immediately
> terminated. When I ran it from a command window it terminated
> immediately, apparently doing nothing at all. Running as Administrator
> didn't help. There was no error message, the log file option didn't
> generate a log file and Googling for a solution didn't come up with
> anything.

There's definitely something weird going on there. I've not personally
tested on Vista but I've not heard any other reports of it not working.

Are you sure the download of the installed completed successfully? If it
exits immediately it sounds like a busted download. Do you have any way
of checking it? Perhaps just the file length if there's no easy way of
doing md5 on windows.

Since you're now using ghc 6.8.2 you'll want this build of gtk2hs which
works with that version of ghc:

http://haskell.org/~duncan/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.9.12.1.exe
length: 13,651,002 bytes
md5:    e48ea30426396bf162106ffcda02847f


> Which is nice, except that when I call "main" twice in succession from
> GHCi, ghc.exe crashes. So I have no confidence in the wxHaskell
> libraries either. I don't want to invest time in programming with
> libraries that perform illegal operations on my operating system.

Note that Gtk2Hs does not suffer from the problem of calling main twice
in ghci.


Duncan