My experience setting up Haskell up for GUI development
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
Hi
A Google search pointed me at two major GUI toolkits for Haskell: gtk2hs and wxHaskell.
My answer is to use Gtk2hs. Unfortunately, the releases are somewhat behind so you usually need to grab a special preview release to get it working on Windows. That's a very sad state of affairs, and as is easy to tell from this email, it gives the impression that Gtk2hs is busted on Windows. The *only* way to fix this is to have Gtk2hs builds go live within minutes of a GHC release going live - and I've been pushing for that for a while (but tend to give up once my computer is fixed...) Hopefully Duncan will know if your problem is due to using an old installer, or just a Vista thing - either way its a safe bet that Duncan will fix it in due course.
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.
Typically you need to use GHC and not GHCi - or at least you get more success that way. If the installation instructions for wxHaskell need improving, do tell the team behind it. wxHaskell was unmaintained for a while, so they are still picking up speed, getting the basics working - before tackling the polish issues. As a reference point, I still do all my GUI programming in C# - although am slowly taking pot shots at Haskell/Gtk2hs as new things crop up. Although I suspect I'm likely to try F# for GUI programming with my next project. Thanks Neil
Thanks for such a quick response! There seems to be a new version of Gtk2hs now (or I accidentally downloaded an old one earlier). Either way the installer was easy to use and the Hello World program ran (even within GHCi). Thanks for your help. I'm very appreciative to all those who work on these projects, sorry for sounding frustrated. Ben
Hello Ben, Sunday, May 18, 2008, 10:26:09 PM, you wrote:
I'm running Windows Vista and I've been trying to set up an environment for writing GUI applications.
i'm a XP user, nevertheless try this for gtk2hs: 6.6.1: http://haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.6.1/ghc-6.6.1-i386-windows.exe http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=49207&package_id=42440 6.8.2: http://haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.8.2/ghc-6.8.2-i386-windows.exe http://haskell.org/~duncan/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.9.12.1.exe the first way is my working environment -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com
"Ben Arnold"
[...] 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 assume that you didn't use :main, but just evaluated "main"... and that either wx or the native windoze gui doesn't like you reinitialising it without unloading the executable that does it or whatever: That's the problem if you call into C code, all kind of things might go wrong. If you don't want to invest time in programming with stuff that can perform illegal operations, or at least be sure that you don't do illegal operations, you are kind of stuck with Haskell, though. You might to try out things like Fruit, which isolate you from all this stuff. -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for past copyright information. All rights reserved. Unauthorised copying, hiring, renting, public performance and/or broadcasting of this signature prohibited.
Ben Arnold wrote:
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.
Yeah, this kind of thing is annoyingly common in Haskell circles. It's not insurmountable though. wxHaskell has been "dead" for a while. It recently came back to life, but I imagine it's still a little dusty round the edges. [FWIW, I'm really happy to see this being revived! I've never used it, but I've heard good things about it...] I do all my work with Gtk2hs. Yes, GTK isn't very common on Windows. But it seems to work the nicest. There's an on-going problem though that each release of Gtk2hs only works with one (or maybe two) releases of GHC, and every time a new release of GHC comes out, you gotta wait a while before Gtk2hs catches up. However, the installer usually *tells* you that's the problem; what you're seeing sounds more like the installer program doesn't like Vista. I can't offer any help in that direction, unfortunately... As for your program crashing when run twice, wxWidgets probably doesn't like being initialised twice. I've never used wxHaskell, and I don't know how your program is structured, but if you can avoid initialising the library twice, you could be able to rerun the core of your program over and over. Otherwise you're kind of stuck with the tedious edit-compile-run cycle.
On Sun, 2008-05-18 at 19:26 +0100, Ben Arnold wrote:
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.
There's definitely something weird going on there. I've not personally tested on Vista but I've not heard any other reports of it not working. Are you sure the download of the installed completed successfully? If it exits immediately it sounds like a busted download. Do you have any way of checking it? Perhaps just the file length if there's no easy way of doing md5 on windows. Since you're now using ghc 6.8.2 you'll want this build of gtk2hs which works with that version of ghc: http://haskell.org/~duncan/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.9.12.1.exe length: 13,651,002 bytes md5: e48ea30426396bf162106ffcda02847f
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.
Note that Gtk2Hs does not suffer from the problem of calling main twice in ghci. Duncan
Duncan Coutts wrote:
Are you sure the download of the installed completed successfully? If it exits immediately it sounds like a busted download. Do you have any way of checking it? Perhaps just the file length if there's no easy way of doing md5 on windows.
http://www.toast442.org/md5/ Useful little program for quickly finding [or checking] the MD5 hash of any file under Windows, using simple drag and drop.
Hello Ben, Sunday, May 18, 2008, 10:26:09 PM, you wrote:
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.
after i've wrote a few thousands lines with gtk2hs, i think the following: if main part of your program is GUI - it's better to stick with C# and all its visual bells and whistles. the only good thing with gtk2hs is that you got Linux portability for free. actually, people will think that you have developed it on linux and ported to windows at the last day :D look at http://freearc.org screenshots or install program itself to see that i mean if you are developing large haskell program and just need to add GUI frontend to it - you are on the right way if you develop serious (say, commercial) application - consider developing algorithm in Haskell and writing GUI in C# or C++ to take best of both worlds. look for example at http://www.bcgsoft.com/ - does this make difference compared to my program? :D -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com
Hi Bulat, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
if main part of your program is GUI - it's better to stick with C# and all its visual bells and whistles. the only good thing with gtk2hs is that you got Linux portability for free. actually, people will think that you have developed it on linux and ported to windows at the last day :D
Isn't there now a Windows native look for gtk2? When will gtk2hs support it? In the meantime, I guess that is an advantage of wxHaskell.
look at http://freearc.org screenshots
Bulat - very, very nice app! Why haven't I noticed that link here before?
if you develop serious (say, commercial) application - consider developing algorithm in Haskell and writing GUI in C# or C++ to take best of both worlds.
But then you need to rewrite the GUI part from scratch to get it to run on other platforms. Regards, Yitz
On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 00:02 +0300, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
Hi Bulat,
Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
if main part of your program is GUI - it's better to stick with C# and all its visual bells and whistles. the only good thing with gtk2hs is that you got Linux portability for free. actually, people will think that you have developed it on linux and ported to windows at the last day :D
Isn't there now a Windows native look for gtk2?
Yep.
When will gtk2hs support it?
It has done for several years now.
In the meantime, I guess that is an advantage of wxHaskell.
As far as I know the visual differences are pretty small. If you know of anything specific we can file bugs with the Gtk+ folk, they've fixed lots of little differences over the last few years. Duncan
Hello Duncan, Monday, May 19, 2008, 1:18:10 AM, you wrote:
As far as I know the visual differences are pretty small. If you know of anything specific we can file bugs with the Gtk+ folk, they've fixed lots of little differences over the last few years.
file open dialogs; treeview -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com
On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 00:13 +0400, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
Hello Ben,
Sunday, May 18, 2008, 10:26:09 PM, you wrote:
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.
after i've wrote a few thousands lines with gtk2hs, i think the following:
if main part of your program is GUI - it's better to stick with C# and all its visual bells and whistles. the only good thing with gtk2hs is that you got Linux portability for free. actually, people will think that you have developed it on linux and ported to windows at the last day :D look at http://freearc.org screenshots or install program itself to see that i mean
Yeah, there are a couple visual improvements you could make. For one thing you could use your own icon rather than the default Gtk+ window icon. Do you use glade to design the UI layout or do you do it by hand in code? It's usually pretty easy to spot UIs that are built by hand or using layout combinators. A good guide here is the GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines). http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/ Duncan
Ben Arnold wrote:
I'm running Windows Vista and I've been trying to set up an environment for writing GUI applications.
<snip>
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
I run Vista Business 32-bit on my desktop, and I installed Gtk2Hs using that LSystemSetup.exe installer. I don't have a link handy, I apologize. That's a handy way to install with a few clicks for non-programmers. Then I have my users launch my app using a .bat file that adds Gtk2Hs to the path (this assumes they installed to the standard location, sadly) so they don't have to go fiddling with their PATH. The good news is that my app (which uses networking, threading, STM and GTK) works with the same code (though obviously different binaries) on Linux and Windows, using GHC 6.8.2. I know that doesn't throw much light on your problem, but Gtk2Hs certainly does work on Vista, and XP as well, and with 6.8.2 even. Hope you find a solution, Braden Shepherdson shepheb
On Sun, 2008-05-18 at 23:09 -0400, Braden Shepherdson wrote:
I run Vista Business 32-bit on my desktop, and I installed Gtk2Hs using that LSystemSetup.exe installer. I don't have a link handy, I apologize. That's a handy way to install with a few clicks for non-programmers.
I had no idea people were using that just to install the Gtk+ dlls.
Then I have my users launch my app using a .bat file that adds Gtk2Hs to the path (this assumes they installed to the standard location, sadly) so they don't have to go fiddling with their PATH.
You can make it much easier for your users. The LSystemSetup.exe installer just unpacks http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/win32/gtk+-2.10.14-win32.zip along with a demo .exe in the bin dir. Because the .exe is in the same dir as the Gtk+ dlls there is no need to use a bat file or change the path. I used innosetup (which is Free Sofware, BSD style license). http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php It could hardly be easier. I half wrote a blog post on this some time ago. Clearly I should finish it off. Duncan
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. This is a known wxHaskell problem, and is a consequence of changes in
Ben Arnold wrote: the underlying design of wxWidgets since wxHaskell was designed. The basic problem is that wxWidgets, since around wxWidgets 2.5, uses C++ static constructors and destructors to initialize and destroy some internal data structures. Unfortunately, on Windows, the only way to make these run is to unload the wxWidgets DLL when main terminates, and this is something we do not currently do (I'm working on it, but it is not trivial, and I have little time to work on the problem, so progress is slower than I would like). If this functionality is essential to you, I can only suggest using wxHaskell 0.9.4 with wxWidgets 2.4.2. This older version of wxWidgets does not use static constructors/destructors, and can be used to execute main more than once. This older revision is three years old now, and will require you to use GHC 6.4. In terms of an 'expert' reference - wxHaskell or GtkHs are the only reasonably maintained GUI options for Haskell. GtkHs has a larger team of contributors, but both are capable of producing complex and stable GUI applications - I can certainly vouch for wxHaskell in this respect (and in respect of speed of development), and the reason I work on it is precisely because I didn't want to see such a superb piece of software rot through lack of attention. However, both projects rely on fairly small volunteer teams working on their spare time out of love (or something like it...), and I think it's fair to say that both teams are some way from matching the ease of developing and deploying of, say, C# or Java. Regards Jeremy O'Donoghue
Thanks. It's actually quite comforting to know that the problems I run into are known issues and gives me a lot more confidence in the tools. As I said I really like Haskell it's a pleasure to program in it and I do appreciate the work that people have put in to make it possible for me to do so! On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 2:15 PM, Jeremy O'Donoghue < jeremy.odonoghue@gmail.com> wrote:
Ben Arnold wrote:
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.
This is a known wxHaskell problem, and is a consequence of changes in the underlying design of wxWidgets since wxHaskell was designed.
The basic problem is that wxWidgets, since around wxWidgets 2.5, uses C++ static constructors and destructors to initialize and destroy some internal data structures. Unfortunately, on Windows, the only way to make these run is to unload the wxWidgets DLL when main terminates, and this is something we do not currently do (I'm working on it, but it is not trivial, and I have little time to work on the problem, so progress is slower than I would like).
If this functionality is essential to you, I can only suggest using wxHaskell 0.9.4 with wxWidgets 2.4.2. This older version of wxWidgets does not use static constructors/destructors, and can be used to execute main more than once. This older revision is three years old now, and will require you to use GHC 6.4.
In terms of an 'expert' reference - wxHaskell or GtkHs are the only reasonably maintained GUI options for Haskell. GtkHs has a larger team of contributors, but both are capable of producing complex and stable GUI applications - I can certainly vouch for wxHaskell in this respect (and in respect of speed of development), and the reason I work on it is precisely because I didn't want to see such a superb piece of software rot through lack of attention.
However, both projects rely on fairly small volunteer teams working on their spare time out of love (or something like it...), and I think it's fair to say that both teams are some way from matching the ease of developing and deploying of, say, C# or Java.
Regards Jeremy O'Donoghue
Ben Arnold wrote: [snip]
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
Hi Ben, Sorry for the late reply, I don't check the cafe list often :) Since it looks like I'll be doing the next gtk2hs release, let me assure you that the installer for the next release will be tested on Vista. (I haven't tested it yet, but I didn't realize until now we had Vista users.) Look for it in the next couple weeks. Also, the current development tree builds quite easily with MinGW and MSYS (see http://www.mingw.org/) and any of the GHC binary installers as far back as 6.4.2. If you get the Gtk+ bundle (http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/gtk+/2.12/gtk+-bundle-2.12.9.z...) then you'll be all set. (Note that I've done all this under XP, YMMV.) I haven't really tried it, but I understand that if you install Glade you pretty much have a RAD environment, a-la Visual Basic or Delphi. You can't really ask for much more than that! Oh, a request to those of you that frequent the cafe list frequently: Could you direct problem reports like this one to the gtk2hs-devel@sf.net list, since while I am subscribed to cafe, I don't read it on a daily basis? Thanks :) Pete
participants (10)
-
Achim Schneider -
Andrew Coppin -
Ben Arnold -
Braden Shepherdson -
Bulat Ziganshin -
Duncan Coutts -
Jeremy O'Donoghue -
Neil Mitchell -
Peter Gavin -
Yitzchak Gale