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

[Ketil Malde]

"Dmitri O.Kondratiev" <dokondr at gmail.com> writes:

> Which platform - Mac OS X, Linux or Win32 is best for development with GHC
> today?

I think most developers use Linux, which tends to ensure that more stuff
will work there.  Most developers will also tend to use recent versions
of everything, so go with Fedora or Ubuntu or Debian testing, rather
than Debian stable or RHEL.

In general, Haskell seems to be quite portable (in contrast to Java,
say), and difficulties seem to be mostly around stuff that requires
interaction with specific C libraries.

> How are things with Ubuntu?

I use Ubuntu.  Most stuff is fairly up-to-date, but even with six-month
releases, it's lagging the cutting edge, and GHC is still 6.12.  Thus, I
tend to install development stuff via Cabal these days, which at least
partly evens out the playing ground between different distributions.

In general, I like Ubuntu for adding a regular schedule to Debian, and
making recommended choices (e.g., which SMTP server to choose?).  I also
like the expermients with the user interface, although I don't use them
myself (xmonad is still less obstrusive and much smaller and faster :-)
Downsides is the huge bug database, where bugs seldom seem to be dealt
with.

(Also, I'm constantly annoyed at all the nice bits that are missing from
 our RHEL/CentOS servers.)

An alternative for me might be Debian testing.

> I don't want to start religious wars,

I tried to be non-flammable.  Let me know if you would like opinions on
Emacs vs vi!

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants