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 <dimitry@golubovsky.org> 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/
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" <ross@soi.city.ac.uk> To: <cvs-hugs@haskell.org> Cc: "C.Reinke" <C.Reinke@kent.ac.uk> 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 <dimitry@golubovsky.org> is working on adding optional Unicode support to Hugs. People who test the CVS version are also a great help.
Further reading
On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 07:20:49AM -0800, Sigbjorn Finne wrote:
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.
That wouldn't be accurate either. There are large chunks of Hugs (module system, static analysis, compilation, abstract machine) that I hardly dare touch. Maybe we should be open about this.
"Ross Paterson" <ross@soi.city.ac.uk> writes:
On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 07:20:49AM -0800, Sigbjorn Finne wrote:
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.
That wouldn't be accurate either. There are large chunks of Hugs (module system, static analysis, compilation, abstract machine) that I hardly dare touch. Maybe we should be open about this.
I think you deserve to be credited for the work you've put into Hugs & have your name up in lights as the maintainer, hence my suggestion. But if you feel that assigns too much responsibility on you for keeping the system healthy, dark corners and all, that's allright. I'm just as happy to have it be labelled as maintained by "Friends of Hugs" (or some such) and leave individuals out of it alltogether. But, if you want the Hugs maintainer token (a real stone token contributed by Andy Gill a couple of years back), it's yours. And, no, it's not a millstone :-) --sigbjorn
I think you deserve to be credited for the work you've put into Hugs & have your name up in lights as the maintainer, hence my suggestion.
I'm with Sigbjorn on this. I see lots of work by you, lots of bugs being responded to by you, etc. You're clearly doing much more work that anyone else and deserve to be credited for that. In contrast, I'm throwing in the odd comment but I don't think I've actually made any commits in more than 12 months. -- Alastair
Claus, Sorry to be so late (I'm sure everyone else was on time), but here's a revised Hugs entry. Ross --------------------------------------------------------------------- Project Status: Stable, actively maintained, volunteers welcome 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 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 and the recent addition of FFI support, 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. Sven Panne intends to modernize the configuration system, which is currently creaking with age, and duplicates parts of the fptools configuration system. The manpower available for Hugs development and maintenance is very limited. Former maintainers Sigbjorn Finne and Jeffrey Lewis are now very busy with other things, but help out when they can. Alastair Reid has also been very busy in the last 6 months. Contributions from volunteers are welcome. For example, Dimitry Golubovsky <dimitry@golubovsky.org> 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/
Ross,
Sorry to be so late (I'm sure everyone else was on time),
sure, everyone is on time, always.. ;-)
Hugs is a very portable, easily installed Haskell-98 compliant interpreter
thanks for your contribution. now added to draft report. I notice that you do not mention yourself among the maintainers. In fact, there are only contributors, no maintainers left? Cheers, Claus
On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 06:02:55PM +0000, C.Reinke wrote:
I notice that you do not mention yourself among the maintainers. In fact, there are only contributors, no maintainers left?
I think that's an accurate picture of the situation. There is no person or small group of people with both the depth of knowledge of the code and the available time to assume responsibility for Hugs. But still most bugs get fixed, and new development continues, as different people find the time. The docs have always said post to the mailing lists rather than individuals, and that's even more true now.
participants (4)
-
Alastair Reid -
C.Reinke -
Ross Paterson -
Sigbjorn Finne