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

[Daniel Fischer]

Am Donnerstag 05 November 2009 23:02:30 schrieb 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.

Neither is it true in the group of people I know.
However, the number of computers in that group which had Windows installed
when they were bought may be close 90% - it's close to impossible to buy a completely 
assembled, ready to go computer without here - which is easily remedied by inserting an 
openSuse or Ubuntu disk as soon as it's connected to power :)

>
> 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.

Still it would be nice if things were easily installable on Windows, so maybe some Windows 
user should write a tool which makes installing C libraries on windows feasible.

>
> 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