[Haskell-cafe] Windows Haskell CI

[Ben Franksen]

Hi Franceso

Am 27.04.20 um 14:57 schrieb Francesco Ariis:
> Recently I was contacted by a user of a small script of mine [1].
> He downloaded the (x86_64) binary and used it on Windows (10?) via
> «Windows Subsystem of Linux».
> 
>      $ uname -a
>      Linux DESKTOP-AHPUUO5 4.4.0-18362-Microsoft #476-Microsoft Fri Nov 01
>      16:53:00 PST 2019 x86_64 x86_64
>      x86_64 GNU/Linux
> 
> I found this fantastic as I loathe dealing with Wine of Virtual Machines
> to provide Win users with a binary.
> 
> I have not touched Windows since XP, but how feasible is it to call it
> a day and tell Win users: «From now on, Darcs will be available on
> Windows via WSL»?

It is tempting. But it feels a bit like defeat. Large parts of the
Haskell ecosystem work perfectly fine on Windows; a lot of effort has
been spent to make standard IO actions work there. I think it would be a
waste not to use that infrastructure and build native Windows binaries.

Still, thanks for mentioning the possibility. We may come back to it as
a last resort.

Cheers
Ben