[Haskell-beginners] Q 2 of 2: GUI and turnkey compiler?

Gan Uesli Starling gan at starling.us
Sat Jun 1 04:20:39 CEST 2013


I think I need to define what is meant by turn-key compiler. That is 
what they called it in JForth. In Perl this same feature goes by the 
term "packed archive" and in LabVIEW they call it a "built application".

It is a feature in those languages whereby you can issue an standalone 
*.exe having within itself, complete unto itself, all that is needed to 
run the script, program, application. The output appears as a single 
file to the end user with the expected extension of *.exe but functions 
in fact more like those ZIP installers which also come with *.exe 
extensions. The size will be bloated, since packed archive has within it 
all from the parent language, modules included, that are needful to run 
the script, at least for Perl. For JForth it was much the same. For 
LabVIEW the output of a "build" requires to have the "runtime engine" 
installed, but which, once installed, is good for ALL applictions and 
will run them but not allow editing.

So, it would be something to allow an author to issue programs which 
end-users would NOT have to know anything about Haskell itself and would 
have to, at most, perform a two-step, wholly automatic installation 
procedure. Short of this, anything I might aspire to give away free to 
the public en masse, could not conceivably be written in Haskell. In 
which case, I'll respectfully bow out from endeavoring to learn it 
myself, however useful it serves for many another purpose.



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