[Haskell-cafe] Julia and Charts on Mac

[Carter Schonwald]

on the OS X ease of install front, ghcformacosx.github.io is a bit easier
to do that homebrew (or at least in my opinionated opinion), and has much
better zeroconfig / isolation

On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 12:05 PM, Ben Gamari <ben at smart-cactus.org> wrote:

> Dominic Steinitz <dominic at steinitz.org> writes:
>
> > I just had an interesting experience installing the Julia charts
> > package (Gadfly based on ggplot) on my Mac which I thought I would
> > share as I know I and other folk have had trouble getting diagrams /
> > Cairo to work on Macs.
> >
> I agree that the current cairo situation could be improved. The fact that
> gtk2hs can't properly depend upon gtk2hs-buildtools means that nearly
> anyone who needs to needs to install any Cairo-based package with
> Cabal has at very least one non-trivial hoop to jump through. In my
> experience this is often only the first of several.
>
> This has always perplexed me as Cairo isn't glib-based, unlike the other
> members of the gtk2hs family. Binding to Cairo should (as far as I know)
> be no harder than binding to any other pure C library. It seems like the
> situation could be improved substantially by simply splitting cairo out
> of gtk2hs, using standard FFI code generation tools (bindings-dsl works
> pretty well in my experience, although plain hsc2hs is also acceptable),
> and simplifying its build system.
>
> That being said, part of me thinks that the days of Cairo being dominant
> means of drawing are numbered. Diagrams can produce SVG without any help
> From Cairo and Chart can now use diagrams as its backend. I would hope
> that installation of pure Haskell libraries would be no harder than
> Julia's process.
>
> The only reason I can think of why this wouldn't be the case is Cabal
> hell. While Julia may not suffer from package-hell yet (due to the young
> age and batteries-included nature of the distribution) they will
> inevitably need to deal with it at some point.
>
> > It installs homebrew and then all the required packages from its own
> > repo (not sure what the homebrew terminology is for this - possibly a
> > brewery?) so presumably guaranteeing that the installation is
> > consistent and “just works”. I must say I was a bit surprised (I think
> > I would have liked it to tell me what it was about to do) but it was
> > entirely painless and I drew my first chart after less than 5 minutes.
> >
> Sounds like quite a pleasant process. It's a shame there isn't more
> community interest in maintaining a Haskell homebrew repository. It
> seems like this could substantially improve the OS X support story.
>
> > PS I am not sure that haskell-cafe is the right list to share this on
> > but as we don’t have a mailing list for numerical stuff or mac
> > stuff...
>
> I appreciated the post.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Ben
>
>
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