Re: Special Invitation :-) HC&A Report (November 2003)

Thanks Ross, looks good, but the maintainer section is out-of-date. I've hardly touched Hugs since March, so having you down as "The Maintainer" would now be correct, really. I don't foresee my rate of contributions to radically pick up either (but will be happy to continue contributing, on&off.) Same goes for Jeff, he's equally embarassed when recognised in the street as the Hugs maintainer. --sigbjorn ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ross Paterson" To: Cc: "C.Reinke" Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 13:49 Subject: Re: Special Invitation :-) HC&A Report (November 2003)

[redirected from hugs-users] On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 06:55:41PM +0000, C.Reinke wrote:

...

in case you haven't seen the calls for contributions on the main Haskell list: the Haskell community hopes to hear from you about all the interesting stuff you've been brewing over the last six months, not to mention the even more interesting stuff in the pipeline!-)

I'm particularly worried about Hugs being the only one of the main Haskell implementations without an update so far..

Here's a possible draft Hugs entry for the HC&A report. Feel free to modify/rewrite/discard:

Project Status: Actively maintained, stable

Hugs is a very portable, easily installed Haskell-98 compliant interpreter that supports a wide range of type-system and runtime-system extensions including typed record extensions, implicit parameters, the foreign function interface extension and the hierarchical module namespace extension.

Current state

The Hugs98 interpreter is now maintained by Sigbjorn Finne and Jeffrey Lewis, both of Galois Connections, with help from Alastair Reid of Reid Consulting and Ross Paterson of City University, London and others.

At the time of writing, a new major release of Hugs is almost ready.

With this release, Hugs will rely exclusively on the Haskell hierarchical libraries. This reduces the amount of Haskell code to be maintained with Hugs, and also increases compatibility with the other implementations. Coverage has also improved -- Hugs now supports imprecise exceptions (but not asynchronous ones), unboxed arrays and more. Compatibility stubs for old libraries are also provided as a transistional measure, but some day these will disappear.

With these library improvements, together with Hugs's long-standing support for various Haskell extensions, code developed with GHC can often be made to work with Hugs too with a little effort. Sven Panne has done this with his GLUT and OpenGL packages, and we would encourage other developers to do the same.

Interoperation with .NET (on Windows platforms), formerly a separate add-on, has been enhanced and is now integrated with Hugs. You can instantiate and use .NET objects from within Haskell, and call and use Haskell functions from any .NET language.

Assorted fragments of documentation have been re-organized and augmented as a Users's Guide describing the current state of Hugs. It is however less complete than we would like in places. Contributions are welcome.

Future plans

Hugs will continue to improve its coverage of the libraries. Older interfaces will disappear.

The manpower available for Hugs development and maintenance is limited, and contributions from volunteers are welcome. For example, Dimitry Golubovsky is working on adding optional Unicode support to Hugs. People who test the CVS version are also a great help.

Further reading

http://www.haskell.org/hugs/