FW: Library infrastructure

[Henrik Nilsson]

Hi,

Malcolm Wallace wrote:

> Well, the following works fine
> 
>     hmake Setup         -- use default Haskell compiler to build script
>     ./Setup             -- run the script
> 
> provided that your default Haskell system is not Hugs.  Hmmm, maybe
> we could tweak hmake to accept Hugs as a sort-of compiler, producing
> a runnable shell-script as the "executable".  The shell script would
> simply invoke runhugs with whatever options were specified for the
> "build".

We at Yale have been developing a Make-based build system aiming at taking
the pain out of building for any combination of Haskell system/OS platform.
It's not perfect, nor quite ready, but it works reasonably well. Except
for some annoying issues on Wondows platforms ...

Anyway, we took the above mentioned approach for Hugs. And not only that,
our build system also takes care of any prerequisite preprocessing/auxiliary
compilation (CPP, arrowp, GreenCard, what have you), thus effectively building
"pure" Haskell code for the library/application in question, which then can
be installed and run without any further fuss/passing complicated options
to Hugs/requiring the end user to install all necessary preprocessors.

>From this perspective, Hugs is not so different from other Haskell systems.

Best regards,

/Henrik

-- 
Henrik Nilsson
Yale University
Department of Computer Science
nilsson@cs.yale.edu