[Haskell-cafe] Building Haskell stuff on Windows

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| > Windows and Haskell is not a well travelled route, but if you stray of
| > the cuddly installer packages, it gets even worse.
|
| But it shouldn't. Really it shouldn't. Even though Windows is not my
| preferred platform, it is by no means different enough to warrant such
| additional complexity. Plus, GHC is developed at Microsoft, and the
| currently most featureful Haskell IDE is on Windows...

We build GHC on Windows every day.  I use MSYS with no trouble.

But the path *is* less travelled, and that means that fewer people know answers, and more problems are not ironed out by previous travellers.  There are also significant gotchas, mostly to do with the attempt to make Windows look like Unix, that are hard to grok.  For example, shell quoting conventions, and MSYS's pathname mangling that makes MSYS look more like Unix.  GHC's build system just works around these.

Still, the more people travel the path, the smoother it'll get.  Please help us make it better.

Simon