[Haskell-cafe] What's the deal with Clean?

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Andrew Coppin wrote:

> I'm dissapointed that Haskell doesn't have *more* of a Windows bias. It 
> _is_ the platform used by 90% of the desktop computers, after all. (As 
> unfortunate as that undeniably is...)

That is not true in my home and its not true where I work.

In addition, saying "90% of all desktop computers" is misleading;
instead we should be talking about the computers of software developers
and there, the figure is almost certainly well below 90%.

> In particular, I really wish we could make is so that stuff from Hackage 
> actually compiles on Windows. (Disclaimer: Stuff written in Haskell 
> compiles just fine. It's FFI bindings that unanimously refuse to 
> compile.) It's also somewhat irritating that the I/O libraries have a 
> few quirks apparently related to mingw32. But hey, that one at least 
> should be fixable...

The problem here is that window is the odd one out.

Stuff written for userspace Linux will usually compile with little
more than minor alterations on OSX and all the other Unix-like
systems. Making that same code build on windows can be a significant
amount of work and that work should not be the responsibility of
the people who write code on Linux and Mac.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/