[Haskell-cafe] Best platform for development with GHC?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2011, Dmitri O.Kondratiev wrote:

> Which platform - Mac OS X, Linux or Win32 is best for development with GHC today?
> How are things with Ubuntu? It was quite a while already that I used Haskell on Linux. Today I have to code on Win32  and Mac OS
> X. Installing extra libraries caused most of the pains for me on Win32 - for example GTK and Gnuplot is not easy to install on
> Win32. Installing GTK on Max OSX is also a hard work, but no problems with Gnuplot at all. Haskell mode for Emacs works fine on
> Mac OS X, but only to some extent on Win32. I have not managed to start GHCi in Emacs buffer on Win32.

Since I maintain the gnuplot binding for Haskell - what are the particular 
problems with that package on Windows?

> I understand that Linux should be a much better environment for integrating with external libraries (just because most of them
> were originally developed for Linux).

I use GHC and GHCi on Linux/KDE. Most editors and text viewers know about 
Haskell and provide syntax highlighting. E.g. if I watch a Haskell module 
in a remote darcs repository with KDE's browser Konqueror, then the text 
is shown with highlighted syntax. It is very helpful, to recognize 
outcommented parts of code quickly. If I edit, I see immediately whether 
comments are closed appropriately.

I once used GHCi on Windows, but I didn't like it, because the Windows 
command line was no fun to use.