Playing with Haskell on Windows

This repository gathers Haskell examples coming from various websites and books. It also includes several build scripts (batch files, Maven scripts) for experimenting with Haskell on a Windows machine.

Ada, Akka, C++, COBOL, Dafny, Dart, Deno, Docker, Erlang, Flix, Golang, GraalVM, Kafka, Kotlin, LLVM, Modula-2, Node.js, Rust, Scala 3, Spark, Spring, TruffleSqueak, WiX Toolset and Zig are other topics we are continuously monitoring.

Project dependencies

This project relies on the following external software for the Microsoft Windows platform:

• Cabal 3.8 ¹ (changelog)
• Git 2.47 (release notes)
• Haskell 8.10 LTS (release notes)

☛ Haskell packages
We present the installed Haskell packages in document PACKAGES.md.

Optionally one may also install the following software:

• Apache Maven 3.9 (requires Java 8+) (release notes)
• ConEmu 2023 (release notes)
• Haskell 9.10 (release notes)
• Stack 2.15 (changelog)
• Temurin OpenJDK 17 (release notes, for Maven)
• Visual Studio Code 1.94 (release notes)

☛ Installation policy
When possible we install software from a Zip archive rather than via a Windows installer. In our case we defined C:\opt\ as the installation directory for optional software tools (in reference to the /opt/ directory on Unix).

For instance our development environment looks as follows (November 2024) ²:

C:\opt\apache-maven\             ( 10 MB)
C:\opt\ConEmu\                   ( 26 MB)
C:\opt\ghc-8.10.7\               (2.5 GB)
C:\opt\ghc-9.6.5\                (2.6 GB)
C:\opt\ghc-9.10.1\               (5.6 GB)
C:\opt\Git\                      (358 MB)
C:\opt\jdk-temurin-17.0.13_11\   (304 MB)
C:\opt\stack\                    ( 74 MB)
C:\opt\VSCode\                   (371 MB)

🔎 Git for Windows provides a BASH emulation used to run git from the command line (as well as over 250 Unix commands like awk, diff, file, grep, more, mv, rmdir, sed and wc).

Directory structure ▴

This project is organized as follows:

docs\
examples\{README.md, HelloWorld, ..}
parconc-examples\{README.md, ..}
PACKAGES.md
README.md
RESOURCES.md
REPL.md
setenv.bat

where

• directory docs\ contains Haskell related papers/articles.
• directory examples\ contains Haskell examples grabbed from various websites (see file examples\README.md).
• directory parconc-examples contains Haskell examples from Simon Marlow's book (see file parconc-examples\README.md).
• file PACKAGES.md presents the Haskell packages our projects depend on.
• file README.md is the Markdown document for this page.
• file REPL.md presents GHCi usage examples.
• file RESOURCES.md gathers Haskell related informations.
• file setenv.bat is the batch command for setting up our environment.

We also define a virtual drive – e.g. drive H: – in our working environment in order to reduce/hide the real path of our project directory (see article "Windows command prompt limitation" from Microsoft Support).

🔎 We use the Windows external command subst to create virtual drives; for instance:

> subst H: %USERPROFILE%\workspace\haskell-examples

In the next section we give a brief description of the batch files present in this project.

Batch commands

We distinguish different sets of batch commands:

1. setenv.bat - This batch command makes external tools such as cabal.exe, git.exe, sh.exe and stack.exe directly available from the command prompt (see section Project dependencies).

   > setenv help
   Usage: setenv { <option> | <subcommand> }
    
     Options:
       -debug      print commands executed by this script
       -verbose    print progess messages
    
     Subcommands:
       help        print this help message
   

2. examples\*\build.bat - Each example can be built/run using the build command.
   

    > build
    Usage: build { <option> | <subcommand> }
     
    Options:
      -debug      print commands executed by this script
      -timer      print total execution time
      -verbose    print progress messages
     
    Subcommands:
      clean       delete generated files
      compile     generate program executable
      doc         generate HTML documentation
      help        print this help message
      run         execute the generated program
    

Usage examples ▴

setenv.bat

We execute command setenv once to setup our development environment; it makes external tools such as cabal.exe, git.exe, sh.exe and stack.exe directly available from the command prompt:

> setenv
Tool versions:
   cabal 3.8.1.0, ghc version 8.10.7, stack 2.15.5, haddock 2.24.2
   hlint v3.5, hpack 0.35.1, htfpp 0.14.0.6, ormolu 0.7.0.0
   java 17.0.13, mvn 3.9.9, git 2.47.0, diff 3.10

> where cabal git hlint hpack sh stack
C:\opt\ghc-8.10.7\bin\cabal.exe
C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
C:\opt\Git\mingw64\bin\git.exe
%APPDATA%\Cabal\bin\hlint.exe
%APPDATA%\Cabal\bin\hpack.exe
C:\opt\Git\bin\sh.exe
C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\sh.exe
C:\opt\stack\stack.exe

Command setenv -verbose also displays the tool paths and defined variables:

> setenv -verbose
Tool versions:
   cabal 3.8.1.0, ghc version 8.10.7, stack 2.15.5, haddock 2.24.2
   hlint v3.5, hpack 0.35.1, htfpp 0.14.0.6, ormolu 0.7.0.0
   java 17.0.13, mvn 3.9.9, git 2.47.0, diff 3.10
Tool paths:
   %APPDATA%\cabal\bin\cabal.exe
   C:\opt\ghc-8.10.7\bin\ghc.exe
   C:\opt\stack\stack.exe
   C:\opt\ghc-8.10.7\bin\haddock.exe
   %APPDATA%\Cabal\bin\hlint.exe
   %APPDATA%\Cabal\bin\hpack.exe
   %APPDATA%\Cabal\bin\htfpp.exe
   %APPDATA%\Cabal\bin\ormolu.exe
   C:\opt\jdk-temurin-17.0.13_11\bin\java.exe
   C:\opt\apache-maven\bin\mvn.cmd
   C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
   C:\opt\Git\mingw64\bin\git.exe
   C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\diff.exe
Environment variables:
   "CABAL_DIR=%APPDATA%\cabal"
   "GHC_HOME=C:\opt\ghc-8.10.7"
   "JAVA_HOME=C:\opt\jdk-temurin-17.0.13_11"
   "MAVEN_HOME=C:\opt\apache-maven"
   "STACK_HOME=C:\opt\stack"

Footnotes ▴

[1] Cabal compatibility ↩

GHC version	Cabal version
9.10	3.12
9.8	3.10
9.6	3.10
9.4	3.8 or later
8.x, 9.x	3.4
8.x	3.2

[2] Downloads ↩

In our case we downloaded the following installation files (see section 1):

apache-maven-3.9.8-bin.zip                         ( 10 MB)
cabal-install-3.8.1.0-x86_64-unknown-mingw32.zip   (  5 MB)
ConEmuPack.230724.7z                               (  5 MB)
ghc-8.10.7-x86_64-unknown-mingw32.tar.xz           (414 MB)
ghc-9.10.1-x86_64-unknown-mingw32.tar.xz           (471 MB)
OpenJDK17U-jdk_x64_windows_hotspot_17.0.13_11.zip   ( 99 MB)
PortableGit-2.47.0-64-bit.7z.exe                   ( 41 MB)
stack-2.15.5-windows-x86_64.zip                    ( 15 MB)
VSCode-win32-x64-1.92.1.zip                        (131 MB)

Version	LLVM	Archive	Installation	Remarks
9.10	.	.	.	.
9.8.1	11-15			Running GHC on Win32 systems
9.6.3	9-12	479 MB	2.78 GB	Running GHC on Win32 systems
9.4.4	9-12	479 MB	2.78 GB	Running GHC on Win32 systems
9.2.2 a)	10,11	331 MB	1.85 GB	Included libraries
9.0.1	9	236 MB	2.64 GB	Included libraries
8.10.7	9-12	414 MB	2.80 GB	Included libraries

^a) We observe a big size difference between version 9.2.2 and the others versions listed above.The difference is located in the lib\x8_64-windows-ghc-9.x.x\ directory, e.g. array-0.5.4.0\ with 1.7 MB versus 4.3 MB due to the absence/presence of the profiling object files (.p_o extension).

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mics/November 2024 ▲