I am trying to get a sense for how much demand there is for a 64-bit version of GHC for Windows. Personally I have two reasons why I would like to have a 64-bit build:

· To allow me to write services in Haskell to be deployed on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing system which requires 64-bit binaries (and life is too short for SysWOW64).

· To allow me to interoperate with 64-bit native libraries e.g. for dynamic code generation for SSE3 vector instructions as supported by the Accelerator system (I’ve done this in F# http://blogs.msdn.com/b/satnam_singh/archive/2009/12/15/gpgpu-and-x64-multicore-programming-with-accelerator-from-f.aspx and it would be good to have a Haskell version too for SSE3 vector code – the GPU version works fine with 32-bit DLLs).

Is anyone else interested in a 64-bit version of GHC for Windows? Simon Marlow reckons it is about 2 weeks work for him so it should only take a mere mortal about a month or two to do. Anyone interested in making a 64-bit Windows port of GHC?

Cheers,

Satnam

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Satnam Singh
Microsoft
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