
Haskell Platform 2013.2.0.0 - lelf
http://www.haskell.org/platform/?v=2013.2.0.0
======
tikhonj
The Haskell platform is the perfect place to start with Haskell--it comes with
the compiler, some useful tools (like cabal, Haskell's package manager) and a
core set of well-tested and well-supported libraries. If you have been
considering Haskell, this is a great time to go for it!

I'm particularly excited by the updated OpenGL and GLUT bindings. Graphics is
currently not Haskell's strong suit, but I think this might soon be changing.
There has been plenty of work on high-level things like functional reactive
programming (FRP), but this isn't all that useful without the low-level
libraries for actually drawing to the screen! These updated packages should
hopefully make writing graphics programs in Haskell much nicer.

~~~
dmead
afaik, carmack is working on a Haskell implementation for wolfenstein 3D. this
might have been his excuse to start that project.

there is a really primative FPS shooter up on the haskell wiki, but its really
not well structured.

<http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Frag>

~~~
dons
To be fair, it is the world's first 3D FPS written using a functional reactive
programming style. 8 years ago. By one guy who was learning Haskell. In 8
weeks.

~~~
chongli
While writing his undergrad thesis at the same time!

------
danieldk
One nice feature of the newer cabal-installs is that it can compile
dependencies in parallel[1], e.g.:

    
    
      cabal install pandoc -j5
    

Will run five parallel cabal processes.

Also this release contains attoparsec and unordered-containers as new packages
\o/.

[1] Obviously, as permitted by the dependency graph. Source files within
packages are not compiled (yet) in parallel.

~~~
gtani
I hope this GSOC module-level parallel build project goes thru

[http://www.google-
melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gs...](http://www.google-
melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/refold/71002?ModPagespeed=noscript)

------
exceptione
In my opinion, Haskell Platform (HP) gets updates too slowly. I understand
that the purpose is to have a coherent set of compatible packages, but in my
opinion there should be a minor HP release for every ghc update in between.
The fixes and improvements in ghc range from usefull to nessecary. It should
be possible to release minor hp updates with the automated test suite.

As a HP user, the wait for ghc-7.6 to be incorporated has been too long imho.

~~~
merijnv
What stopped you from installing ghc-7.6 yourself? I've been using 7.4 (from
Platform) and 7.6 in parallel for over half a year without problem.

~~~
exceptione
ok! Well I was terrified by the big fat warnings that doing so might break
your packages randomly.

~~~
merijnv
GHC uses a per-version package database, so that should never be possible for
different GHC versions. For example, I have the 7.4 from platform installed in
/usr/bin/ghc (the normal location for Platform installs on OSX) and 7.7
installed in ~/ghc.

Switching between the two versions is as easy as making sure that ~/ghc/bin is
on my path before /usr/bin/ghc. All I need to do is "export
PATH=~/ghc/bin:$PATH" and things work. Packages get installed in either
~/Library/Haskell/ghc-7.4.1 or ~/Library/Haskell/ghc-7.7 depending on what's
in my path when I run "cabal install".

~~~
exceptione
Ah thanks, did not know that! I'm on Windows but switching paths should be
possible on Windows as well. :)

------
gaius
The Haskell guys really, really need a coherent story for database access.
Perl has this with DBI/DBD for example, Java with JDBC, .NET has one (or ten,
depending how you count it), etc. Adding that to Platform is the single
biggest thing they could do to drive adoption.

~~~
stablepeak
What's wrong with HDBC?

~~~
gaius
HDBC isn't in Platform!

------
obviouslygreen
Maybe I'm expecting the wrong thing, but as someone not involved in
development with Haskell, this landing page gave me nothing to go on.

~~~
tome
The link which takes you to the closest thing to an About page is, for some
reason, labelled "Problems?".

<http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_Platform>

------
stablepeak
Is there something like ipython for Haskell? GHCI is fine but some subtleties
are missing. Like typing a prefix and going through a subset of the command
history. And also the numpy/scipy/matplotlib toolkit that come with the -pylab
option would be great!

~~~
triplepoint217
Maybe it is possible to write a haskell mode for ipython? I watched Fernando
and one of the Julia guys hack up communication between ipython and a Julia
interpreter in an afternoon. Depending on how ghci is implemented it might not
be much harder.

~~~
gtani
[http://bfj7.com/posts/2013-04-22-innovation-week-
days-1-2.ht...](http://bfj7.com/posts/2013-04-22-innovation-week-
days-1-2.html) (haven't tried it yet)

------
adamtulinius
Changelog: <http://www.haskell.org/platform/changelog.html>

------
anthonymonori
Can somebody elaborate what is this?

Edit: Let me rephrase my question: Is this for someone who would like to start
learning Haskell?

~~~
maximilian
In short: Yes.

It is the "batteries included" version of Haskell that comes with basically
everything you need to write production ready software. There are obviously a
lot of useful packages on `cabal`, but they are mostly useful so that you
don't have to recreate the wheel (or want to do web-dev).

------
bitcracker
I would also recommand EclipseFP. It is an amazingly well working Eclipse
Plugin for Haskell with incremental compiling, debugger, Smalltalk like
browser, and other nice features.

<http://eclipsefp.github.io/features.html>

~~~
exceptione
It is a very good plugin. Moresmau and other contributors deserve a statue.

It even has support for uuagc (dsl for attribute grammars)!

------
markokocic
I already have ghc-7.6.3 installed and up to date cabal. What do I get by
installing haskell-platform that I don't have right now? AFAIU Haskell
Platform is just a vetted list of packages bundled with GHC?

~~~
carterschonwald
There's also a few other small tweeks, at least over building ghc from source.
But the tweeks don't matter unless you're doing relatively unusual stuff (like
trying to ffi out avx simd enabled c codes :-) ). (Which will be easier do do
with any ghc in a week or so once some tool hacking I'm doing is done)

------
daGrevis
Link to Arch Linux package is broken.

Here is out-dated version from AUR though.
<https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/haskell-platform/>

~~~
vimes656
Officially Arch Linux doesn't follow the platform. The Haskell platform tries
to pick the most mature and well tested versions. Arch Linux, on the other
hand, picks the upstream bleeding edge for all its packages, not only Haskell
ones. Right now, the policy seems to pick the latest package versions needed
to build the latest version of pandoc and XMonad.

This is not necessarily bad. I like to develop in Arch because it usually
comes with future versions that will eventually make it into the platform (I
have the GHC version in mind, mostly). However, if you want to distribute your
code widely, you'd better be sure it builds properly with the current Haskell
platform.

------
undoware
I've recently discovered livescript (livescript.net), a puckishly named
coffee-script-inspired transpiler for node. Its syntax captures some of the
best of Haskell, without going down the 'HaskellScript' route followed by e.g.
Fay (which I find tends to trade off usability and fitness for purpose against
fidelity to the original.) Livescript's answer to underscore is called
'prelude-ls' and is pretty powerful. Highly recommended for Haskell fans stuck
in a sandbox.

------
SkyMarshal
Fwiw it installs beautifully on Debian-based systems using the Debian
Alternatives system:

[https://github.com/byrongibson/scripts/tree/master/install/h...](https://github.com/byrongibson/scripts/tree/master/install/haskell)

This lets you install multiple versions, of both Platform and standalone GHC,
and swap the active one with a single command. Those scripts are for a prior
version, but works the same, just update the versions.

------
pjmlp
The new documentation format is quite nice!

------
Rickasaurus
Would be great to have an actual aggregated changelog.

------
platz
is this supported on ubunty raring yet?

------
stefantalpalaru
On a Gentoo system you can install it with:

    
    
        layman -a haskell
        emerge haskell-platform

