Interfacing to OLE/COM: HaskellDirect the only game in town?

[Simon Marlow]

Alistair Bayley wrote:
> I want to use some MS Windows OLE/COM libraries from Haskell, and this 
> page:
>  http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Libraries_and_tools/Interfacing_other_languages 
> 
> 
> and Google suggest that HaskellDirect is the only game in town. Is
> this the case? And, does anyone have recent experience of it? Is it
> still usable, or has it bit-rotted?

It has bitrotted to some extent.  In Visual Haskell we use 
HaskellDirect-generated interfaces with a lot of hacking by hand to make 
it work, I don't believe we can re-generate the source files from IDL 
any more.  Also, we needed to modify the com library that comes with 
H/Direct in various ways.  You can take a look at the Visual Haskell 
sources here:

   darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/vshaskell

There's definitely a gap in the market for a good COM interop tool.

Cheers,
	Simon