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

[Daniel Fischer]

On Saturday 27 April 2013, 19:18:35, Andrew Cowie wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-04-26 at 21:21 -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.
> 
> Silly question, but have you tried *building GHC from source*?
> 
> Building GHC is non-trivial, but basically boils down to having an
> existing ghc that runs enough to bootstrap, right? So you can take a
> (quite old, sure, no problem) ghc out of the RHEL 5 repositories and use
> that to build a current GHC 7.6 say.

It's not quite as convenient as that, since you need a new enough GHC to build 
7.6 (not sure which version is required).

So you'd probably need to build one or two intermediate GHCs from source, 
depending on what you can directly install.

Building from source isn't so difficult, you need a gcc, you need to install 
happy and alex (sufficiently old versions for the start, install the newest 
versions before you build the final GHC), and of course a working GHC.

./configure --prefix=$HOME
(or where you want to install GHC)
make && make install

You then have a lot of time to drink tea.

> That _would_ be linked against whatever library stack you have present,
> and you should be ok from there.