[Haskell-community] [Haskell-cafe] technical thoughts on stack

[Patrick Pelletier]

On 9/13/16 1:16 PM, Paolo Giarrusso wrote:
> To clarify: I'm not proposing stack to install those GHCs, just to use 
> them.
>
> I think the extra work would be limited (calling GHC-X.Y.Z instead of 
> GHC) and has other technical advantages 
> (https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/issues/2433). Mind you, 
> I'm willing to contribute the work and not asking anybody—I've just 
> been busy.
>
> Right now I have to modify the PATH every time I use GHC 7.8.4 because 
> I needed to customize the build (I'm on OS X 10.11), but I still want 
> GHC 8 by default.

That reminds me: another thing I'd like to see (from either cabal or 
stack) is better support for cross-compilation.  Cabal supports 
cross-compilation very poorly; you end up having to do ugly stuff like:

alias mcabal="cabal --with-ghc=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl-ghc 
--with-ld=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl-ld 
--with-gcc=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl-gcc 
--with-ghc-pkg=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl-ghc-pkg"

and even then, it doesn't work with non-trivial packages.

As far as I know, stack doesn't support cross-compilation at all. (But 
perhaps it's just not documented, or I've missed the documentation.)

--Patrick