[Hugs-users] needing some Hugs

[Alex Dubov]

 > On Thursday, 5 July 2018, 9:37:14 am AEST, Anthony Clayden <anthony_clayden at clear.net.nz> wrote:
> 
> >
> Is anybody still listening here?
> 
> I see the Hugs source distro is still around - vintage 2006, and there's somebody curated it on github.
> 
> I'm particularly looking for a version with TRex, but the github-curated version doesn't seem to include that(?)
> 
> Can anybody comment on how easy it is to compile Hugs (on Windows), compared to compiling GHC? The instructions for Hugs make out it's reasonably easy, whereas the instructions for GHC seem to be fraught with gotchas. But perhaps Hugs has as many gotchas, just not documented(?)
> 
> My impression from discussion forums when Hugs was still active, is that Hugs source was easier to hack if you wanted to experiment with changes to the language(?)
> 
> What seems sad these days is that GHC is so monstrous and formidable, hardly anybody builds experimental extensions to Haskell.
> 
> Thank you
> AntC
> 

Back in a day, I wanted to build an embeddable Haskell interpreter for guile-like (or js-like) uses. And yes, hugs was way more approachable then GHC - it was mostly rather clear-cut  C code which was easy to rearrange and recompile.

But those days most people are on managed run-times anyway (be it jvm, clr or something js-based) and those can do scripting and extensions just fine as they are.

Regards,
Alex D