[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: Generic Haskell 1.80 (Emerald)

[Thomas van Noort]

Hello,

I took the liberty to move this discussion to the Haskell-Cafe mailing list.


Adrian Hey wrote:
> Thomas van Noort wrote:
>>    Pleasant programming,
> 
> Hello,
> 
> This looks like good stuff. But having done all this work it seems
> a pity not to go the extra mm and cabalise this and make it buildable
> on all platforms (at least ghc supported platforms).

You are right, cabalizing the Makefiles implies that Generic Haskell can 
be build on any platform that is supported by GHC. However, this 
requires a tremendous amount of effort since the Makefiles of Generic 
Haskell are enormous.

> 
> The reason I'm interested is this may be useful for the GSoC project
> I'm mentoring..
> 
>  http://code.google.com/soc/2008/haskell/about.html
> 
> But as things are, I'd be unlikely to consider introducing a dependency
> on this. Even if it built "out of the box" with cygwin (which it
> doesn't BTW) I don't really think many windows users will be keen to
> install cygwin and learn how to use it just so they can build GH.

As you already noticed, there is no Windows binary available for the 
Emerald release. However, there is one for the Coral release, available 
from:

http://www.generic-haskell.org

Although this is an old release of Generic Haskell, this release already 
supports generic types, which is what you need for your project 
probably. In the user's guide, there is a small example available which 
defines a generic type to represent tries.

The latest release of Generic Haskell supports generic views for generic 
types. This allows you to define a generic type that generates efficient 
balanced tries, as you can read in my Master's thesis :) This requires 
the use of the balanced view on the type level. Unfortunately, this 
generic view is not implemented in the Generic Haskell compiler...

> 
> Thanks
> -- 
> Adrian Hey

Regards,
Thomas