Andrew Coppin wrote:
Depends what you develop. I know of plenty of developers who use MS Visual Studio for everything, for example.
And those developers do not care whether Haskell libraries compile on windows or not.
You can pretend that Windows isn't popular and thus there's no need to support it, but to me that seems like a fairly unrealistic point of view.
Windows is popular amongst general computer users, but less popular amongst developers and less popular still amongst Haskell developers.
The problem here is that window is the odd one out.
This, it seems, is why there are programs in this world that are designed for Windows but (sometimes) also run on Unix,
This is a very small proportion of all windows applications and many/ most of them run via Wine, a code base of 1.8 million lines with a worth according to Ohloh of $29Mil (which I consider very conservative): http://www.ohloh.net/p/wine
and other programs which are designed for Unix but (sometimes) also run on Windows.
A far larger proportion of Unix program run on windows, due to two factors: - Unix people write command line apps and libraries which are always easier to port to windows. - Unix people doing things like windows backends to GTK+ and QT to make GUI applications portable to windows.
I'm just saying, we could still do better...
My point is that its up to people who care about windows to fix things for windows. I am a user of Debian and Ubuntu. About a year ago I became sick and tired of the poor state of haskell in Debian. I didn't complain, I joined the debian-haskell-maintainers group and started packaging haskell stuff for Debian. Now, the situation has improved vastly. Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/