skaller wrote:
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.
"The binaries needed by programs built by these tools...", you're referring to the C runtime DLLs? Why does that matter? Note I said "with no dependencies" above. A Windows native port of GHC would require you to go to MS and download the assembler and linker separately - we couldn't automate that, there are click-through licenses and stuff.
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..
MS pays for Ian Lynagh, who works full time on GHC as a contractor. MS puts roughly as much money into GHC as it does into F#, FWIW. Cheers, Simon