[Haskell-cafe] Julia and Charts on Mac

[Kyle Marek-Spartz]

If you use Homebrew Cask (http://caskroom.io/), you can:

brew cask install ghc

which uses the ghcformacosx.github.io installer.

There's also installers in Cask for e.g. Leksah and some other useful
Haskell tools.


Carter Schonwald writes:

> 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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--
Kyle Marek-Spartz