Version 6.4.1 (released 19 September 2005)

Online Docs

Source Distribution

The source distribution needs an installed GHC 5.X or 6.X to build. If there isn't a binary distribution for your platform (any version), then you'll need to consult the section on Porting GHC in the Building Guide.

Binary Packages

The OS-specific packages (eg. RPMs on Linux) are generally a better bet than the vanilla .tar.bz2 binary bundles, because they will check for dependencies and allow the package to be uninstalled at a later date.

However, if you don't have permission to install binaries on your system, or you want to install somewhere other than the default place (usually /usr or /usr/local), then you'll need to use a .tar.bz2 binary bundle.

Available binary distributions:

Linux (x86)

  • Fedora. RPMs available from the Fedora Haskell Project.
  • RedHat Linux/x86 9.0 RPMs. These may work on any system with glibc 2.3, SuSE 9.1 and SuSE 9.2 have been tested.

  • Debian. see below.
  • Gentoo. GHC is available as an ebuild. However, the ebuild for 6.4.1 may be masked, depending on your setup.
  • Generic Linux with glibc 2.3 (e.g. RedHat 9). This is a complete build, including interactive system, profiling libraries and documentation.

NOTE: You need the libreadline.so.4 and libncurses.so.5 libraries to use the Generic Linux distributions above. Newer Linux distributions come with libreadline.so.5 only (e.g. SuSE 9.2), so we have provided a readline4 compatibility RPM for this case.

Linux (x86_64)

  • Fedora. RPMs available from the Fedora Haskell Project.
  • Gentoo. GHC is available as an ebuild. However, the ebuild for 6.4.1 may be masked, depending on your setup.
  • Generic .tar.bz2 binary bundle. This was built on Fedora FC3, your mileage may vary. It is a complete build, including interactive system, profiling libraries and documentation.

Linux (HPPA)

  • Generic .tbz2 binary bundle. This build is designed to be unpacked under /usr, you'll need to edit the shell scripts in bin/ to use it elsewhere.

    The Linux/HPPA build is contributed by Chris Parrott.

Linux (PowerPC / PowerPC 64)

  • Gentoo has support for GHC on PowerPC and PowerPC 64. However, the ebuild for 6.4.1 may be masked, depending on your setup.

Sparc/Solaris

NOTE: you must use GCC 2.95 or 3.4+ on Sparc. There is a known bug with GCC versions between 3.0-3.3 which causes incorrect code to be generated.

This is a complete build, with profiling libraries and docs. The build was done (using GCC 3.4.4) on Solaris 2.8, but was also tested under Solaris 2.10.

NOTE: you'll need libreadline.so.5, libncurses.so.5, and libgmp.so.3. You should ensure you have these before you start, since without them GHC won't work at all. Grab the ncurses and readline sources from GNU and build them if you don't have them.

Sparc/Solaris distributions were built by Christian Maeder.

Windows (x86) (standalone)

This is a Windows Installer for Microsoft Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP, prepared by Sigbjorn Finne. It's a complete build, as above.

This installer relies on the Windows Installer runtime to operate. If, after having downloaded the above file, double-clicking on the MSI file doesn't start up the installer, the likely cause is that you don't have the Windows Installer runtime installed on your machine. You can download it from Microsoft:

Install the appropriate version, then double-click again on the MSI file.

If just want the files, a .zip bundle is also provided: ghc-6-4-1.zip

Windows (x86) (Visual Studio version)

Visual Haskell is a Visual Studio extension for Haskell, which comes with a complete GHC installation. Currently the GHC version packaged with Visual Haskell is a pre-release 6.5, not 6.4.1.

Debian: x86, alpha, hppa, m68k, powerpc, s390, sparc

All these platforms have ghc packages in unstable in the main Debian archive (and should move into testing shortly). Only x86 and sparc are registerised. "apt-get update; apt-get install ghc6 ghc6-prof ghc6-doc" as normal, with ghc6-hopengl, ghc6-libsrc providing some extra bits for those who want them.

For x86 I've also compiled for stable and uploaded to Isaac's "Haskell Experimental" repository. To use it add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://www.syntaxpolice.org/haskell-experimental/stable/ and install as above.

The Debian packages are maintained by Ian Lynagh.

FreeBSD (x86)

GHC is in the FreeBSD ports tree as lang/ghc.

To install a binary package, try pkg_add -r ghc provided the package exists on whatever mirror site your system is set up to use.

To install from source instead, make sure your copy of /usr/ports is up to date, and say cd /usr/ports/lang/ghc && make install.

MacOS X 10.3 (Panther) and 10.4 (Tiger)

This is an installer package that will install a full version of GHC with GHCi, profiling, dynamic linking, double-clickable icons and HTML documentation on Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.

This is a standard unix-style binary package with GHCi, profiling, dynamic linking and HTML docs. It requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and libreadline.5.0.dylib. The readline library is expected to be installed in /usr/local/lib, but you can change those expectations using the following command:

install_name_tool -change /usr/local/lib/libreadline.5.0.dylib \
  /some/new/path/libreadline.5.0.dylib \
  ghc-6.4.1/lib/powerpc-apple-darwin/ghc-6.4.1

MacOS X packages were prepared by Wolfgang Thaller.

MacOS X 10.3 & 10.4 (using darwinports)

GHC 6.4.1 is now available for OS X via the darwinports system.

The compiler is built from source, using a binary bootstrap compilier. Both 10.3 (Panther) and 10.4 (TIger) are supported.

For more information on darwinports, see: http://darwinports.opendarwin.org