[Haskell-cafe] Julia and Charts on Mac

[Dominic Steinitz]

Cool - I did not know that - thanks for sharing

Dominic Steinitz
dominic at steinitz.org
http://idontgetoutmuch.wordpress.com

On 2 Dec 2014, at 04:09, Kyle Marek-Spartz <kyle.marek.spartz at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>>> 
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> 
> --
> Kyle Marek-Spartz