[Haskell-cafe] Batteries included (Was: GHC is a monopoly compiler)

[Tillmann Rendel]

Hi,

Theodore Lief Gannon wrote:
> GTK on Windows is trivial at this point, with stack and LTS 7+. Try it
> yourself:
>
> stack exec -- pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk3
> stack install gtk2hs-buildtools
> stack install gtk3 --flag gtk3:build-demos
> gtk2hs-demo-carsim
>
> (I didn't start 100% clean but I don't *think* there are any other
> pacman packages required...)

I had to first work around a pacman issue:

   stack exec -- pacman -Sy
   stack exec -- pacman -S pacman-mirrors

And then I had to install pkg-config:

   stack exec -- pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config

Then the installation commands you provided worked for me.

However, I could not just run gtk2hs-demo-carsim but had to run the 
following to expose the GTK DLLs to the executable:

   stack exec -- gtk2hs-demo-carsim

Not trivial, but certainly much better than it used to be.

(Still too hard for beginners in some setups. For example, in Tübingen, 
we have an introductionary programming lecture with 500 students. We 
cannot provide installation support that scales to that number of 
students, so our programming environment has to install flawlessly on 
stock Windows laptops, preferably without having to use the command line 
at all. We want to spend the first lab session programming, not setting up.)

   Tillmann