Randy Polen, undertook porting the new build of Haskell Platform to Windows. He did a great job... but as this is first time stepping up to such a big release, he has some questions about GHC and Windows, and the choices he had to make. He asked me to forward these to this list, as he's not a member. He's cc'd so you can reply to all and include him... or I can forward as needed.
From Randy:
I am building the Haskell Platform 2014.2.0.0 on the Windows side. Your advice would be very helpful to make sure the HP 2014 for Windows is as good as possible. There were some issues I worked-around, plus some features that seem to not be available in this particular GHC (7.8.3) on the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms, and I would like to confirm that HP 2014.2.0.0 will be shipping something sensible and as expected for the Windows environment, noting things which are supported on other environments but not on Windows. * GHC 7.8.3 on Windows does not support building Haskell into shared libraries, (GHC ticket #8228) so all packages in HP 2014.2.0.0 for Windows have been built without --enable-shared * GHC 7.8.3 on Windows does not currently support LLVM (GHC ticket #7143) * All Windows HP 2014.2.0.0 packages have been built without --enabled-split-objs, in deference to the GHC 7.8 FAQ * Extra python, etc. bits included in the GHC 7.8.3 bindist for 64-bit Windows (GHC issue #9014) are not installed with Windows HP 2014.2.0.0. Is eliding them from the HP 2014.2.0.0 64-bit Windows installation safe and correct (i.e., are they truely not required)? * Missing src/html in GHC packages were worked around by replacing the entire GHC package doc tree of html files with the contents of the "Standard Libraries" tarball (but not for the two packages which are not built for Windows, terminfo and unix). Is this valid to do? Any issues might arise? * ref: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/libraries.html.tar.bz2 Thanks for any advice on these. I do want to make the Windows HP 2014.2.0.0 be as good as it can be. Randy