Hard earned hints for using Win32 GHC 4.08.2 and HDirect.

[Mike Thomas]

Hi all.

I thought I might share some hints on making HDirect work with GHC 4.08.2.


Installing and checking GHC:

 - Get the installer from the GHC downloads page, do the installation per
the instructions there, including Cygwin etc.

 - Remove the digit "1" from the bottom of lib/imports/win32/Win32.hi

 - Remove old .hi files from any program source directories you may have.

 - To test, try compiling the Windows hello.lhs example using the command
line "ghc hello.lhs -o hello.exe -package win32" and run hello.exe.

 - If you get linker errors about "import____timezone_dll" from time.o, you
need to add the line:
  push(@SysLibrary, '-lcrtdll')  if ($TargetPlatform =~
/-(mingw32|cygwin32)$/);
below the line:
  push(@SysLibrary, '-lwsock32') if ($TargetPlatform =~
/-(mingw32|cygwin32)$/);

in your "bin/ghc" driver script.  This is because the distribution is built
with an old version of Cygwin GCC which links against crtdll.dll rather than
msvcrt.dll when -mno-cygwin is set on the command line (GHC uses mingw32).
By doing this, spare symbols are resolved after linkage with msvcrt.dll.  DO
NOT SUBSTITUTE -lmsvcrt with -lcrtdll. If you substitute, you will get
errors about running out of resources on fileOpen at run time.

 - You may also need to update your GCC Mingw32 libraries and headers from
the Sourceforge Mingw32 downloads page if you have unexplained crashes.


Building HDIrect 0.17

 - Uninstall previous versions of HDirect including "lib/imports/com" and
associated libraries, which don't work very well with GHC 4.08.2.

 - Get the source from the HDirect web site and untar it somewhere.

 - You may need to edit "lib/WideStringSrc.c" if you use the latest Cygwin
distribution to remove a clashing definition and declaration of wcslen().

 - Build per the instructions in the INSTALL file.

 - This gives you a bare bones ihc.exe which cannot handle type libraries.

 - Install the freshly built lib/*.hi files in a new ghc "lib/imports/com"
directory and also the libraries (libHScom.a, libhdirect.a) into ghc's "lib"
directory.

 - Do "make clean", deleting "src/ihc.exe" by hand.

 - Set SUPPORT_TYPELIBS=YES in "src/Makefile"

 - "make boot", "make", then "make lib" as before.

 - You now have version 0.17 of HDirect for Windows.


Question Time:

Why does ihc ignore binary interfaces in type libraries such as dx7vb.dll?


Cheers

Mike Thomas