[Haskell-cafe] Looking for portable Haskell or Haskell like language

[Francesco Mazzoli]

At Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:21:48 -0800,
Christopher Howard wrote:
> Hi. I've got this work situation where I've got to do all my work on
> /ancient/ RHEL5 systems, with funky software configurations, and no root
> privileges. I wanted to install GHC in my local account, but the gnu
> libc version is so old (2.5!) that I can't even get the binary packages
> to install.
> 
> I've had success installing some other simple functional languages (like
> CLISP) on these same systems, so I was wondering if there was perhaps
> another language very similar to Haskell (but presumably simpler) with a
> super portable compiler easily built from source, which I could try.
> 
> I'll admit -- I haven't tried the HUGS compiler for Haskell. The quick
> description didn't make it sound much more portable than GHC, but I
> guess I could try it if I heard some good reasons to think it would be
> more portable.

Hugs is ANSI C, and it doesn’t really get more portable than that.  However it
is only an interpreter, if you want a compiler you might might want to try
nhc98, which aims to be very portable as well <http://www.haskell.org/nhc98/>.

The problem with both of these solutions (Hugs a bit less than nhc98) is that
you won’t be able to enjoy the ecosystems that has grown in the recent years
around GHC.  But if you just want to write some standard Haskell programs, they
should be OK.

Francesco