[Haskell-cafe] Re: binding to C libraries on Windows was Low Level Audio - Writing bytes to the sound card?

[Stephen Tetley]

Hi John

Fair points - but aren't you always going to 'need' at least MinGW?
(for some degree of 'need' of course, I use it quite a bit though
prefer Cygwin, I suppose Andrew C. would care not to use either).

GHC brings with it gcc and ld, ar ... but not much else, so when a C
library isn't all but self-contained, you would have to use MinGW to
get the .a file - SDL for instance just distributes the .dll in the
runtime library package. Also gnuwin32 is a wee bit spartan by my
consideration [1], but perhaps you could knock my 95% guess for
Hackage bindings libraries needing Unix emulation down to 60%, or 50%.
Likely I was wrong with my guestimate in the first place by thinking
mainly about 'multimedia' libraries.



Best wishes

Stephen


[1] Presumably you mean here?
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html