#148: Cabal should be able to produce foreign libs (shared or static) ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Reporter: eivuokko | Owner: Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Cabal-1.8 Component: Cabal library | Version: HEAD Severity: normal | Resolution: Keywords: | Difficulty: project(> week) Ghcversion: | Platform: ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Changes (by duncan): * platform: Windows => * ghcversion: 6.4.2 => * summary: Cabal should be able to produce DLLs in Windows => Cabal should be able to produce foreign libs (shared or static) * milestone: _|_ => Cabal-1.8 Comment: More people are trying to do this kind of thing, see: http://ha4.fajno.net/2009/03/pandoc-can-we-use-it-ouside-of-haskell.html There are also plenty of people in commercial settings doing this on Windows and who could do with more help from Cabal. This ticket mentions Windows and DLLs but we have the same issue with Unix systems and generating shared or static libs for consumption by foreign code. Whatever solution we come up with should be as cross-platform as possible. One question, is the choice of static lib or dynamic lib part of the package description or part of the way we choose to build it? Should we be able to build both from the same description? When you're building it, should you have to specify if you want to make a static lib or shared lib? For Haskell libs we have to say at configure time if we want shared or static. For this case perhaps it's more part of the package description than a configuration option. For Windows DLLs I hope there will be no need to specify `.def` files. We should be able to get the exact export list from the list of FFI ccall/stdcall exports. Note this issue is independent of whether ghc supports shared libs for the RTS and Haskell packages on a particular platform. If it doesn't we just generate massive libs that link in everything. If it does we can make small libs that dynamically link to the RTS and Haskell packages. -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/148#comment:4 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects