[Haskell-cafe] Looking for portable Haskell or Haskell like language

Christopher Howard christopher.howard at frigidcode.com
Sat Apr 27 23:09:35 CEST 2013


On 04/27/2013 08:36 AM, Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
> Christopher Howard:
> Is the portability which worries you, or the age of your system?
> 

Actually getting a successful build and installation would be great.
Also, there are multiple systems I work with, both of which have ancient
software, but unfortunately are not the same configuration. I often find
software that builds on one, but not the other.

> Hugs (and Gofer before) are simply sufficiently old... I used them on
> Red Hat in one of my previous lives.
> Do you really need to compile your system from sources?
> 

I guess not, if I can get one to install successfully to a local
(non-root) user account. As mentioned, GHC Linux binaries failed me
here, because apparently the gnu libc version is too old. With most
software, I generally have had more success installing from source than
trying to work with pre-built.

> There are binaries everywhere. If you want a *simpler* language, perhaps
> try Miranda? Also a quite ancient language...
> 
> Or, perhaps a newer one, in some aspects simpler than Haskell (but far
> from any simplicity): Clean.
> 

To be clearer, I do not really want any language other than Haskell. I
just imagined that a simpler language might have a simpler and more
portable compiler.

> Perhaps it might help to know what do you need it for...
> 

In brief, I have access to some large super computer systems. Sadly,
nobody in my academic or work circles seems to have the slightest
interest in applying functional languages to parallel computing problems
(C and Fortran seem to be the languages of choice.) So, I've been poking
around with some functional languages, trying to see what I could get
installed (without any admin assistance whatsoever) and how I might be
able to use them with the MPI or even GPGPU infrastructure we have. But
I keep running into problems, because the software infrastructure is
quite ancient (for compatibility purposes, I'm told), or there are other
mysterious configuration issues.

-- 
frigidcode.com

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