Mark, Randy, Sorry for the delayed reply! On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 9:49 PM, Mark Lentczner wrote:

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

That's correct.

* GHC 7.8.3 on Windows does not currently support LLVM (GHC ticket #7143)

Correct.

* All Windows HP 2014.2.0.0 packages have been built without --enabled-split-objs, in deference to the GHC 7.8 FAQ

No, this shouldn't be needed. split-objs should work just fine on Windows; the FAQ was referencing the fact that *users* using split-objs in their Cabal configurations will probably get odd behavior (we don't encourage split-objs outside of the packages GHC ships). Sometimes bugs arise but these generally aren't high priority for arbitrary user code. (It will also hurt users since it will dramatically increase link time - it should only be used for GHC libraries!) If you have issues here, please let me know; it's a bug.

* 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)?

Hmmmm, that seems like a total oversight on my part! Yes, deleting them should be fine. Upon review, I think they're just artifacts of our 64 bit MinGW distribution.

* 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

This should be just fine.

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

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