[Hugs-users] needing some Hugs

[Simon Peyton Jones]

|  ghc/ghci. It's lightweight and its language is properly documented (in the
|  Haskell 98 report), neither of which can be said of ghc.

I think that’s a little unfair to GHC 😊. If you don't give any language extension flags you get Haskell 98 -- or nowadays Haskell 2010. 

Simon

|  -----Original Message-----
|  From: Hugs-Users <hugs-users-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Doug McIlroy
|  Sent: 06 July 2018 15:04
|  To: hugs-users at haskell.org
|  Subject: Re: [Hugs-users] needing some Hugs
|  
|  I have little constructive to say on the topic, except that I typically use
|  hugs in preference to "monstrous"
|  ghc/ghci. It's lightweight and its language is properly documented (in the
|  Haskell 98 report), neither of which can be said of ghc. Its rudimentary
|  instrumentation (:set +s) is more useful than ghc's equivalent, though
|  admittedly ghc has many debugging features I haven't explored.
|  
|  That said, it should be noted that I do not use Haskell (nor, nowadays, any
|  other language) for writing production code.
|  
|  Apropos of language, a couple of years ago I noted that ghc implements 2^99
|  languages, not one. (There were 99 non-antonymous language pragmas; there
|  may be more now.) Who can know what terrors lurk there.
|  My first attempt to investigate the field (turn on all 99) caused a compiler
|  panic, since fixed.
|  
|  Early on, I encountered a hugs bug: garbage collection in the middle of a
|  bignum operation caused havoc.
|  Having never looked at the hugs source before, I was able quite quickly
|  pinpoint the offending code; the maintainers corrected it almost overnight.
|  That heart-warming experience hasn't worn off, even though the maintainers
|  have moved on.
|  
|  Doug
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