I'm running Windows Vista and I've been trying to set up an environment for writing GUI applications.
A Google search pointed me at two major GUI toolkits for Haskell: gtk2hs and wxHaskell.
I started with gtk2hs. The installation instructions were straightfoward and easy to follow, but they just didn't work. The installer did nothing. It opened a command window and immediately terminated. When I ran it from a command window it terminated immediately, apparently doing nothing at all. Running as Administrator didn't help. There was no error message, the log file option didn't generate a log file and Googling for a solution didn't come up with anything.
So I gave up on gtk2hs.
WxHaskell was a little trickier but more successful. There didn't appear to be any installation instructions on the website, but it did imply that I needed to install wxWidgets first. I did that, and made sure the paths didn't have spaces in them (yawn). And after restarting the PC eventually I got a working Hello World dialogue box.
Which is nice, except that when I call "main" twice in succession from GHCi, ghc.exe crashes. So I have no confidence in the wxHaskell libraries either. I don't want to invest time in programming with libraries that perform illegal operations on my operating system.
I like Haskell; I really do. I've toyed around with it before a few times and I want to learn more about it, but I can't confine myself to command-line applications forever and for better or worse I run a Windows box.
So, in practice, do other people write GUI apps with Haskell on Windows? And if they do, how do they do it? I feel I've got to the stage where I need a concrete recommendation from the experts.
My installation:
- Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit 6.0.6001
First attempt
- GHC 6.6.1
- gtk2hs-09.12.exe
Second attempt
- GHC 6.8.2
- wxMSW 2.6.3
- wxHaskell 0.10.3
Ben