[Haskell-cafe] Unix emulation

[Stephen Tetley]

On 22 August 2010 16:56, Tillmann Rendel
<rendel at mathematik.uni-marburg.de> wrote:

> One needs a compiler and libraries on the one hand, and a bunch of
> command-line tools on the other hand. On Windows, MinGW provides the former,
> while Cygwin provides a package manager to install the latter.


Its not ideal to use MinGW with Cgywin. For Haskell development, you
want to be linking to C libraries compiled with MinGW's GCC.

You can use Cygwin, and cross compile with MinGW's GCC, but this is
likely to be more tiresome than using MSys and makes a problem for
every compile and build - as you are cross compiling you can't just
./configure && make && make install. Whereas MSys just has the initial
problem that it no longer has a comprehensible install plan.

The hyperbole in my original message was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but
there's a fair amount of truth in it - MinGW / MSys is a very good
system, its sad that it is in such a crazy state at the moment. MSys
has all the tools (bash, perl, make, autoconf) needed for compiling
and excepting the installer situation, it is very stable.