[Haskell-cafe] How outdated is Hugs?

[Ross Paterson]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 10:21:42PM +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> On 29 Jan 2009, at 20:49, Ross Paterson wrote:
>> Hugs uses cpphs, but it has to build a dozen packages (including  
>> Cabal) before cpphs is available.  Once it is, they're built again.
>
> That strikes me as odd.  The cpphs implementation deliberately has  
> minimal dependencies - Haskell'98 libraries only, and no internal cpp  
> (rather obviously).  It should be possible to build cpphs first, before 
> any package.

I realize that nhc98/yhc treat the Haskell 98 modules as primitive, but
in the libraries shared by GHC and Hugs, the haskell98 package depends on
7 other packages.  It's true that we could then run cpphs directly, but
we need Cabal to build hsc2hs and everything else, and it needs 3 more.