[Haskell-cafe] Re: binding to C libraries on Windows

[John D. Earle]

There are several C standards by year of publication. There are also drafts 
of those standards. A C compiler may comply with a draft of the official 
standard before it became official, but not the official standard itself. 
Rarely does anyone seek full compliance with respect to any standard it 
seems and it can take years before everyone has bother themselves enough to 
bring themselves up to speed with whatever the current standard is supposed 
to be.

I use the Microsoft CL compiler (aka Visual C++). It has some undocumented 
quirks/optimizations, but for the most part if you are doing native 
development it seems fine. It is the official compiler so you just have to 
learn to love it.

The problem seems to be if you are coming from a POSIX environment and 
assuming that Windows is going to honor its conventions. I personally don't 
bother with the C library very much. I deliberately avoid it. Its Win32/64 
programming all the way with me. That too has its undocumented quirks, but 
is better documented that the brief Java documentation for example. Windows 
programming can be quite difficult. It is just that I've been around it for 
so long.

Windows and Mac are not designed for people who are not dedicated to working 
with these environments. I have experience in both of them. You may want to 
use Microsoft Visual C++ to access the Microsoft .NET Framework rather than 
bother with the C library. There is a Haskell library designed to help you 
access the Microsoft .NET Framework directly from Haskell on Windows. Even 
so, you may want to work with C++ to do this because the Microsoft 
documentation will not explain to you how to do this in Haskell.

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Andrew Coppin" <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>
Sent: 09 Wednesday December 2009 1159
To: <haskell-cafe at haskell.org>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: binding to C libraries on Windows

> Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
>> There are bigger problems than that. The Microsoft compiler still doesn't
>> support large chunks of the 1999 ISO C Standard.
>>
>
> Seriously? OK, well that's news to me. I was under the impression that 
> practically all C compilers in existence support the same set of features. 
> (Although I'm sure each one probably has a few non-standard additions 
> too.)
>
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