On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 08:49 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
I don't think we'll be able to drop the mingw route either, mainly because while the MS tools are free to download, they're not properly "free", and we want to retain the ability to have a completely free distribution with no dependencies.
I'm not sure I understand this. MS tools are free to download by anyone, but not redistributable. The binaries needed by programs *built* by those tools are not only free to download, they're free to redistribute, and they're less encumbered than almost all so-called 'free software' products. Don't forget -- Windows isn't a free operating system. You're juggling some possible problem with a single source vendor withdrawing supply (possible) against open source products which are late to market (definite :) 64 bit Mingw .. will already be years out of date when it turns up, since MS is focusing on .NET platform. MSVC++ tools already support CLR, assemblies and .NET: even if Mingw supported that .. you'd still need Mono (does it work, really?) for a 'free' platform .. but .NET is redistributable and available on most modern Windows platforms already .. I doubt the Open Source community is as reliable a supplier for the Windows market as Microsoft. It's really a boutique market. Cygwin was a major platform in the past, for running Unix software on Windows. But now we're talking about a Windows *native* version of GHC, there's no "Unix" in it. I see no real reason not to build for the native toolchain .. and plenty of reasons not to bother with others. Hmm .. can't MS be coaxed into supplying some support to the developers? After all, Haskell IS a major lazily evaluated statically typed functional programming language. Why wouldn't MS be interested in bringing GHC on board? They have an Ocaml (called F#) now.. -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net> Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net