Mac OS X Strike Force

From HaskellWiki

Current revision

The following is a wiki page to centralize discussion of how to improve Haskell on Mac OS X. The name "strike force" comes from dons' post on reddit and the comments therein.

1 Goals

1.1 Take care of the Haskell Platform installer

The Haskell Platform installer is now maintained by Mark Lentczner. The build is now a Makefile that is part of the Haskell Platform source tree.

• what are the most pressing things on the todo list?
  • script a reliable uninstaller for prior versions
  • work out how to suport: { 10.5 | 10.6 | 10.7 } × { 32bit | 64bit } × { Xcode 3.2 | Xcode 4.1 } with as few versions as possible.

This is done in version 2011.4.0.0 of the Haskell Platform

1.2 Make GUI-bindings easy to install

Neither wxHaskell nor Gtk2hs with native Gtk seems to be easy to install. What's the state of HQK and qtHaskell?

• We should provide at least one easy way to install one set of GUI bindings

1.2.1 wxHaskell

wxHaskell got a lot easier to install in April 2012, with the 0.90 release. See WxHaskell/Mac for details. Should be just a matter of a little homebrew and cabal install wx.

Note that using MacPorts is problematic because of iconv-related issues that various people have reported on the mailing list. I doubt qtHaskell is immune from this.

IMHO, it could be worthwhile to point people to a standard wxWidgets pkg.

1.2.2 qtHaskell

qtHaskell with i386 ghc can be compiled with the following steps:

• Install Qt via MacPorts with the universal option set.
• Install Perl 5.12 via MacPorts.
• qmake will default to building x86_64 binaries, which does not work with 32-bit ghc. Modify /opt/local/libexec/qt4-mac/mkspecs/macx-g++/qmake.conf, adding the following lines:

QMAKE_CXXFLAGS = -arch i386
QMAKE_CFLAGS = -arch i386
QMAKE_LFLAGS = -arch i386

• You could also create your own spec (macx-g++-i386?), and modify build.pl in the qtHaskell top-level directory to use this spec.
• Build qtHaskell by executing the build script in the top-level directory.

1.3 Make GHC 64 bit

Mac OS X GHC Trac tickets:

• [2965] is the main ticket, with lots of CC: people
• [4163] gives some cross-compiling hope

1.4 Reduce the number of GHC tickets

• All Mac OS X GHC Trac tickets

2 Information

2.1 Wiki

• Mac OS X
• Mac OS X Common Installation Paths
• Using Haskell in an Xcode Cocoa project

2.2 Installing Haskell

2.2.1 How Haskell is on OS X today

The simplest methods are currently:

• Binary GHC framework (/Library/Framework)
• Binary Haskell platform framework (/Library/Framework)
• MacPorts (/opt/local)
• Fink (/sw)
• Homebrew (symlinked into /usr/local ?)

2.2.2 Manually compiled

ChrisKuklewicz 11:53, 6 September 2010 (UTC) I use MacPorts for the infrastructure and compile ghc against /opt/local but with --prefix=/opt/ghc-6.12.3 to keep it separate.

2.2.3 Dynamic Linking

working in GHC HEAD, not in any released version.

2.2.4 Difficult libraries on OS X

Libraries needed for ghc

• iconv (older version in /usr is incompatible with new version from MacPorts)
• readline (faked in /usr, provided by framework or MacPorts)
• gmp (framework or MacPorts)

Libraries needed for other packages? gtk?

2.3 OS X code integration

Write Haskell in XCode?

Write ObjectiveC against GHC.Framework?

FFI for Objective C from Haskell?

2.4 Improvements?

A cabal2pkg that maintains proper dependency tracking?

Discussion forum for all this?

You can discuss it on Haskellers at [1]

Category: WxHaskell