Re: [Haskell-cafe] Julia and Charts on Mac

If you use Homebrew Cask (http://caskroom.io/), you can: brew cask install ghc which uses the ghcformacosx.github.io installer. There's also installers in Cask for e.g. Leksah and some other useful Haskell tools. Carter Schonwald writes:

on the OS X ease of install front, ghcformacosx.github.io is a bit easier to do that homebrew (or at least in my opinionated opinion), and has much better zeroconfig / isolation

On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 12:05 PM, Ben Gamari wrote:

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Dominic Steinitz writes:

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I just had an interesting experience installing the Julia charts package (Gadfly based on ggplot) on my Mac which I thought I would share as I know I and other folk have had trouble getting diagrams / Cairo to work on Macs.

I agree that the current cairo situation could be improved. The fact that gtk2hs can't properly depend upon gtk2hs-buildtools means that nearly anyone who needs to needs to install any Cairo-based package with Cabal has at very least one non-trivial hoop to jump through. In my experience this is often only the first of several.

This has always perplexed me as Cairo isn't glib-based, unlike the other members of the gtk2hs family. Binding to Cairo should (as far as I know) be no harder than binding to any other pure C library. It seems like the situation could be improved substantially by simply splitting cairo out of gtk2hs, using standard FFI code generation tools (bindings-dsl works pretty well in my experience, although plain hsc2hs is also acceptable), and simplifying its build system.

That being said, part of me thinks that the days of Cairo being dominant means of drawing are numbered. Diagrams can produce SVG without any help From Cairo and Chart can now use diagrams as its backend. I would hope that installation of pure Haskell libraries would be no harder than Julia's process.

The only reason I can think of why this wouldn't be the case is Cabal hell. While Julia may not suffer from package-hell yet (due to the young age and batteries-included nature of the distribution) they will inevitably need to deal with it at some point.

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It installs homebrew and then all the required packages from its own repo (not sure what the homebrew terminology is for this - possibly a brewery?) so presumably guaranteeing that the installation is consistent and “just works”. I must say I was a bit surprised (I think I would have liked it to tell me what it was about to do) but it was entirely painless and I drew my first chart after less than 5 minutes.

Sounds like quite a pleasant process. It's a shame there isn't more community interest in maintaining a Haskell homebrew repository. It seems like this could substantially improve the OS X support story.

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PS I am not sure that haskell-cafe is the right list to share this on but as we don’t have a mailing list for numerical stuff or mac stuff...

I appreciated the post.

Cheers,

- Ben

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