Help wanted! Win32 and HGL for GHC on Windows

Dear GHC users This is an appeal for help with the libraries/Win32 package [on Windows, obviously] libraries/HGL package [on Windows] Here's the situation: * Win32 provides access to the native Windows API, which is obviously very useful for people writing Haskell on Windows. HGL, the "Haskell Graphics Library", is the graphics package used by Paul Hudak's book "The Haskell School of Expression". * The libraries/Win32 package is supposed to supercede the old hslibs win32 package. Ross Paterson ported the latter to become the former, but the libraries/Win32 package had not received very much testing, and Ross can't do any more himself. We aren't confident that it's reliable. (Sadly, the two packages have the same name (modulo case) which has given rise to much confusion. But that's another matter.) * The libraries/HGL package works fine on Unix, where it sits on top of the libraries/X11 package. But it does not work properly on Windows, where it sits on top of libraries/Win32. It is not clear whether the problem is with the HGL package or the Win32 package. So the current situation is that, for GHC on Windows, the new hierarchical libraries world lacks (a) a reliable Win32 package and (b) a HGL package that works at all. This is sad, especially as we are trying to nuke hsllibs altogether. Question: would anyone be willing to fix the libraries/Win32 package; and (better still) look after it thereafter? We'd be delighted to give commit rights to anyone who was willing to do this. [So far as we know the two libraries/ packages work ok in Hugs, so there probably isn't that much to do.] Many thanks Simon

On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 09:20 +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
Dear GHC users
This is an appeal for help with the
libraries/Win32 package [on Windows, obviously] libraries/HGL package [on Windows]
Here's the situation:
* Win32 provides access to the native Windows API, which is obviously very useful for people writing Haskell on Windows. HGL, the "Haskell Graphics Library", is the graphics package used by Paul Hudak's book "The Haskell School of Expression".
Well for the special case of the SOE library I have a re-implementation of it based on Gtk+/cairo which should work on all platforms. Another advantage is that it looks nicer when implemented with cairo: http://haskell.org/~duncan/gtk2hs/SOE-cairo.png HGL implementation vs Gtk/cairo implementation If people actually use the rest of the HGL then this doesn't help. I'm planning either to bundle this module with the next Gtk2Hs release or release it as a seperate Cabal package. Duncan

Am Freitag, 14. Oktober 2005 11:28 schrieb Duncan Coutts:
[...] Well for the special case of the SOE library I have a re-implementation of it based on Gtk+/cairo which should work on all platforms. [...]
Which additional stuff would one have to install on an e.g. off-the-shelf SuSE Linux distribution or Win2k to use your SOE version? If the answer is not "none", then there is a good point in making HGL work on plain X11 *and* Win32. :-) Cheers, S.

On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 19:03 +0200, Sven Panne wrote:
Am Freitag, 14. Oktober 2005 11:28 schrieb Duncan Coutts:
[...] Well for the special case of the SOE library I have a re-implementation of it based on Gtk+/cairo which should work on all platforms. [...]
Which additional stuff would one have to install on an e.g. off-the-shelf SuSE Linux distribution or Win2k to use your SOE version? If the answer is not "none", then there is a good point in making HGL work on plain X11 *and* Win32. :-)
Gtk+ comes with all linux distros and Solaris and *BSD. There is a seperate installer for Gtk+ on Windows. The HGL, X11 and Win32 packages are currently bundled with GHC so they have one up there in terms of ease of installation. In the future if/when GHC unbundles some of the extra packages then installing Gtk2Hs would be the same as installing X11+HGL. And on Windows I'm looking into including Gtk+ with the Gtk2Hs installer rather than as a seperate download, so it'd be the same as installing HGL. Duncan
participants (3)
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Duncan Coutts
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Simon Peyton-Jones
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Sven Panne