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GHC 7.8.1 released

haskell.org

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Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#61

Post by jeorgun »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #51
dbbolton wrote: post #49

A bit off topic- why is GHC so large? I recently noticed it was over three times the size of gcc (for amd64, in an .xz archive).

This might be interesting to you: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4858585/why-is-ghc-so-lar...

Now I'm kind of curious. The GHC is listed there as being 113 megabytes. When I try to install it on Arch Linux, the size is listed as 736MB! What in God's name is Arch doing to nearly septuple the size of this package— and more to the point, does anyone know any way of getting it to not do that? I'd very much like to learn Haskell, but taking up that much space on my laptop's SSD is a dealbreaker.

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#62

Post by jberryman »

masida wrote: post #13

What will be the easiest way to get GHC 7.8.1 running alongside the official GHC packages for Debian (specifically Jessie)? Should I download a package from http://deb.haskell.org/ ? If so, where can I find 7.8.1?

The binary distributions install alongside your system packages or other bindists quite nicely (they might overwrite the /usr/bin/ghc symlink, but that's it) and you can select which ghc version you want to use when using cabal with the `-w` flag. Each will keep a separate package db, etc. So be bold!

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#63

Post by virtualwhys »

nnq wrote: post #44
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #21

I really want to get into Haskell, but I just don't understand it. The tutorial on the official site doesn't do it for me. Can anyone suggest alternative resources for learning? I'm used to C-like languages. Thanks for all the responses. I'll start with LYAH.

I sincerely recommend against LYAH! It takes sooooooooo loooooong to get to the interesting bits that actually make Haskell worth learning an has so many try-to-be-funny examples that it makes you run away screaming... I tried going through it but it was literally oscillating between putting my mind to sleep and making wish to grab a chainsaw :) And the "humor" and "pretty pictures" don't help either... they were mor…

I concur, LYAH was, for me, not a terribly useful intro to Haskell.

Running through some chapters of Real World Haskell online, however, is proving to be a bit of an eye opener ;-)

Might just be that I could care less about hand drawn illustrations and the occassional somewhat humerous aside.

YMMV, many seem to love LYAH.

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#64

Post by BSousa »

I know enough about Haskell to be excited, but recently, I implemented a few systems with F# and am really happy with the language. If we forget about the .net/MS thing (and all the hatred that comes from that), are there real true advantages of going Haskell for a greenfield project over F# ? (I have a couple heavy algorithm heavy Haskell projects done, but having worked with F# more and more, I feel like it is so much nicer as a modern, not bend over your back to deal with the purity/lazy aspects language than Haskell).

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#66

Post by elwell »

dbbolton wrote: post #49

A bit off topic- why is GHC so large? I recently noticed it was over three times the size of gcc (for amd64, in an .xz archive).

Short answer: GHC is not just a compiler; it's also a rather large library.

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#67

Post by dllthomas »

chongli wrote: post #65
dllthomas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your objections to OverloadedStrings?

It can give unexpected/wrong results when working with Unicode strings.

A reasonable objection, but I don't see that it applies to OverloadedLists either directly or by analogy (though I could totally be missing something).

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#68

Post by hesselink »

chongli wrote: post #65
dllthomas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your objections to OverloadedStrings?

It can give unexpected/wrong results when working with Unicode strings.

Can you elaborate? Perhaps you are talking about the Char8 ByteString instance? It was a mistake to declare that instance, I think.

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#69

Post by chowells »

I've been playing around with the new PatternSynonyms extension. In combination with the existing ViewPatterns extension, I'm going to really have to change the way I think about API design. This is actually pretty fantastic.

    {-# LANGUAGE ViewPatterns, PatternSynonyms #-}
    
    import Data.Set as S
    
    -- patterns that a library might provide
    pattern x : Just (x, m))
    pattern m :> x  Just (x, m))
    pattern Null    True)
    
    -- a really dumb test function using those patterns
    doubleMin :: (Ord a, Num a) => Set a -> Set a
    doubleMin (x :
Ignore how dumb my test function is, and just focus on how lightweight it becomes to match views of the data structure. Figuring out what patterns to include my libraries is going to be a fun new design point.

Re: GHC 7.8.1 released

#70

Post by iand675 »

chc wrote: post #45
gregschlom wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, it's quite easy to call Objective-C methods (or more correctly, to send messages to Objective-C selectors) and perform other Objective-C-related tasks from C. See: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/... This is actually what the Objective-C compiler does. It translates your Objective-C code to C method calls.

It's not that easy. I mean, just sending a message could entail one of objc_msgSend, obj_msgSend_stret or objc_msgSend_fpret, and which one you want to use is not always as clear-cut as you might prefer ( http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/archive/2008/10/30/objc_e... ). And then there's the hassle of defining classes dynamically, which entails six function calls just to create a class with one empty method, and one…

The other hard part about it is that Haskell's FFI doesn't support variadic functions in a friendly way, which makes argument passing that much trickier.
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