Sorry to hear this. I found that make boot doesn't work for me either, but if I just type "make all" after it stops, everything seems to work. You can certainly not just use the ihc.exe from H/Direct 0.16 binary release.
I see. Trying again and again, I could compile H/Direct `without no trouble' -- rather than successfully. This is how I compiled H/Direct 0.17 with GHC 4.08.2 (Windows Installer Release), 1. Install some more Cygnus tools into ghc/bin. * sh.exe in ash ... to make GHC compilable (probably the leak of package). * date.exe in sh-utils ... used in `make boot'. * dlltool.exe, dllwrap.exe in binutils ... used in `make lib' for compiling Hugs libraries (optional?). 2. Edit line 156 in lib/WideStringSrc.c as such. (Otherwise, a confliction error will occur.) extern int wcslen (const WCHAR* wstr); into extern size_t wcslen (const WCHAR* wstr); 3. Type them in the following order at the H/Direct toplevel: $ make boot $ make all $ make lib 4. Copy hdirect/lib/libHScom.a into ghc/lib. (Otherwise, ghc cannot find -lHScom.) Then I tried to compile examples/string, and get the following output: Hello world Thanks!