Answer: The Haskell Platform ships with a 32bit version of ghc, and this explains why glut32 is used. I tried to use 64bit ghc-7.8.2 with the same glut library, and got the message "Missing C library glut32". There is no problem using 32bit ghc-7.8.2 (with the --extra-lib-dirs option). The error message is misleading though... On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 7:31 PM, Dominick Samperi wrote:

It appears that The Haskell Platform includes libglut32.a and other important libs, so it is self-contained, provided users can work with the version of ghc that is provided: currently 7.6.3 under Windows.

In particular, 'cabal install glut' works fine with the default version of ghc. But if I try using ghc-7.8.2 I get: Configuring GLUT-2.5.1.1... cabal: Missing dependencies on a foreign library: * Missing C library: glut32 ...

All of the following do not change the result: 1. Adding --extra-lib-dirs=c:\glut-3.7.6-bin to the command line. 2. Using freeglut instead of glut 3. Copying libglut.a from The Haskell Package mingw/lib directory to c:\ghc-3.8.2\mingw\lib (dangerous because I am mixing architectures here).

How does cabal decide that the C library glut32 is missing? Where is it looking? Why doesn't it look in the places I specify?

Thanks, Dominick