Re: Success Story: Cabal and Dlls

Ah, when I was looking for information on doing this I didn't think to check the Visual Haskell source. Perhaps I didn't think of it because I have yet to get it building (but I think I've found a few things that are probably easy to improve, for example, when the .cabal file has a syntax error Visual Haskell doesn't report the error correctly). If you get a chance I would appreciate it if you could look over the code I posted on the wiki and try to improve it with your knowledge. Thanks, Jason On 7/26/06, Krasimir Angelov wrote:

Hi Jason,

I am using the same technique to build VSHaskell itself.

Cheers, Krasimir

On 7/27/06, Jason Dagit wrote:

...

Hello,

I would like to report that I was able to use Cabal with Visual Haskell to build Dlls in windows. I have posted the details about this on the Haskell wiki (and started an extremely minimal Cabal page). If my content is in the wrong place, please feel free to move it (or edit it or whatever).

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal

The trick was to take the final HSfoo-0.1.o file generated by the normal build process (and linked with the DllMain.c code) and tell ghc to build a dll. I use -package with each of the dependencies in the cabal file to link with the needed libraries. The resulting dll seems to be working.

This approach is a bit hackish and while I've tried to implement as much of it as I can in a general way it requires you to hack your Setup.lhs file if you want to 1) build static 2) specify your exports 3) specify the name of the resulting dll. Also, it's only been tested on my setup which uses Visual Haskell so it may not be fit for general consumption. Finally, I just started really looking at Cabal yestarday so I may not have considered things which an experienced Cabal user would think about.

Is it possible to get this functionality built directly into Cabal so that I tell it I want a DLL built from a library and it knows how to make it happen?

Thanks, Jason _______________________________________________ Libraries mailing list Libraries@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/libraries