binary installations installation, of binaries Installing from binary distributions is easiest, and recommended! (Why binaries? Because GHC is a Haskell compiler written in Haskell, so you've got to “bootstrap” it, somehow. We provide machine-generated C-files-from-Haskell for this purpose, but it's really quite a pain to use them. If you must build GHC from its sources, using a binary-distributed GHC to do so is a sensible way to proceed. For the other fptools programs, many are written in Haskell, so binary distributions allow you to install them without having a Haskell compiler.) This guide is in two parts: installing on Unix-a-likes, and installing on Windows. bundles of binary stuff Binary distributions come in “bundles,” one bundle per file called <bundle>-<platform>.tar.gz. (See the building guide for the definition of a platform.) Suppose that you untar a binary-distribution bundle, thus: % cd /your/scratch/space % gunzip < ghc-x.xx-sun-sparc-solaris2.tar.gz | tar xvf - Then you should find a single directory, fptools, with the following structure: binary distribution, layout directory layout (binary distributions) Makefile.in the raw material from which the Makefile will be made (). configure the configuration script (). README Contains this file summary. INSTALL Contains this description of how to install the bundle. ANNOUNCE The announcement message for the bundle. NEWS release notes for the bundle—a longer version of ANNOUNCE. For GHC, the release notes are contained in the User Guide and this file isn't present. bin/<platform> contains platform-specific executable files to be invoked directly by the user. These are the files that must end up in your path. lib/<platform>/ contains platform-specific support files for the installation. Typically there is a subdirectory for each fptools project, whose name is the name of the project with its version number. For example, for GHC there would be a sub-directory ghc-x.xx/ where x.xx is the version number of GHC in the bundle. These sub-directories have the following general structure: libHSstd.a etc: supporting library archives. ghc-iface.prl etc: support scripts. import/ Interface files (.hi) for the prelude. include/ A few C #include files. share/ contains platform-independent support files for the installation. Again, there is a sub-directory for each fptools project. html/ contains HTML documentation files (one sub-directory per project). man/ contains Unix manual pages. This structure is designed so that you can unpack multiple bundles (including ones from different releases or platforms) into a single fptools directory this doesn't work at the moment : % cd /your/scratch/space % gunzip < ghc-x.xx-sun-sparc-solaris2.tar.gz | tar xvf - % gunzip < happy-x.xx-sun-sparc-sunos4.tar.gz | tar xvf - When you do multiple unpacks like this, the top level Makefile, README, and INSTALL get overwritten each time. That's fine—they should be the same. Likewise, the ANNOUNCE-<bundle> and NEWS-<bundle> files will be duplicated across multiple platforms, so they will be harmlessly overwritten when you do multiple unpacks. Finally, the share/ stuff will get harmlessly overwritten when you do multiple unpacks for one bundle on different platforms. OK, so let's assume that you have unpacked your chosen bundles into a scratch directory fptools. What next? Well, you will at least need to run the configureconfigure script by changing your directory to fptools and typing ./configure. That should convert Makefile.in to Makefile. installing in-place in-place installation You can now either start using the tools in-situ without going through any installation process, just type make in-place to set the tools up for this. You'll also want to add the path which make will now echo to your PATH environment variable. This option is useful if you simply want to try out the package and/or you don't have the necessary privileges (or inclination) to properly install the tools locally. Note that if you do decide to install the package `properly' at a later date, you have to go through the installation steps that follows. To install an fptools package, you'll have to do the following: Edit the Makefile and check the settings of the following variables: directories, installation installation directories platform the platform you are going to install for. bindir the directory in which to install user-invokable binaries. libdir the directory in which to install platform-dependent support files. datadir the directory in which to install platform-independent support files. infodir the directory in which to install Emacs info files. htmldir the directory in which to install HTML documentation. dvidir the directory in which to install DVI documentation. The values for these variables can be set through invocation of the configureconfigure script that comes with the distribution, but doing an optical diff to see if the values match your expectations is always a Good Idea. Instead of running configure, it is perfectly OK to copy Makefile.in to Makefile and set all these variables directly yourself. But do it right! Run make install. This should work with ordinary Unix make—no need for fancy stuff like GNU make. rehash (t?csh or zsh users), so your shell will see the new stuff in your bin directory. Once done, test your “installation” as suggested in . Be sure to use a -v option, so you can see exactly what pathnames it's using. If things don't work as expected, check the list of know pitfalls in the building guide. link, installed as ghc When installing the user-invokable binaries, this installation procedure will install GHC as ghc-x.xx where x.xx is the version number of GHC. It will also make a link (in the binary installation directory) from ghc to ghc-x.xx. If you install multiple versions of GHC then the last one “wins”, and “ghc” will invoke the last one installed. You can change this manually if you want. But regardless, ghc-x.xx should always invoke GHC version x.xx. bundles, binary There are plenty of “non-basic” GHC bundles. The files for them are called ghc-x.xx-<bundle>-<platform>.tar.gz, where the <platform> is as above, and <bundle> is one of these: prof: Profiling with cost-centres. You probably want this. profiling bundles bundles, profiling par: Parallel Haskell features (sits on top of PVM). You'll want this if you're into that kind of thing. parallel bundles bundles, parallel gran: The “GranSim” parallel-Haskell simulator (hmm… mainly for implementors). bundles, gransim gransim bundles ticky: “Ticky-ticky” profiling; very detailed information about “what happened when I ran this program”—really for implementors. bundles, ticky-ticky ticky-ticky bundles One likely scenario is that you will grab two binary bundles—basic, and profiling. We don't usually make the rest, although you can build them yourself from a source distribution. testing a new GHC The way to do this is, of course, to compile and run this program (in a file Main.hs): main = putStr "Hello, world!\n" Compile the program, using the -v (verbose) flag to verify that libraries, etc., are being found properly: % ghc -v -o hello Main.hs Now run it: % ./hello Hello, world! Some simple-but-profitable tests are to compile and run the notorious nfibnfib program, using different numeric types. Start with nfib :: Int -> Int, and then try Integer, Float, Double, Rational and perhaps the overloaded version. Code for this is distributed in ghc/misc/examples/nfib/ in a source distribution. For more information on how to “drive” GHC, either do ghc -help or consult the User's Guide (distributed in several pre-compiled formats with a binary distribution, or in source form in ghc/docs/users_guide in a source distribution). Getting the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) to run on Windows95/98 or Windows NT4 platforms can be a bit of a trying experience. This document tries to simplify the task by enumerating the steps you need to follow in order to set up and configure your machine to run GHC (at least that's the intention ;-) An installation of GHC requires ca. 70M of disk space. The size of the installed GHC distribution is just(!) 17M, the rest is needed by supporting software. To run GHC comfortably, your machine should have at least 32M of memory. Much of the Unixy stuff below involves setting environment variables. This section summarises how to set these variables on a Windows machine, in case you don't know alread.y On WinNT/Win2k, to edit your PATH variable (for example), do the following: Press Start/Settings/Control Panels Double-click System Press Advanced Press Environment Variables Under System Variables, select PATH Press Edit Add ";C:/whatever/" to the end of the string (for example) Press OK Some environment variables are “user variables” and some are “system variables”. I'm not sure of the difference but both are changed though the same dialogue. In addition, when running a Cygwin (see ) shell you can set environment variables in your .bashrc file. But it is better to set your environment variables from the control panel (they get inherited by bash) because then they are visible to applications that aren't started by bash. For example, when you're invoking CVS (and ssh) via Emacs keybindings; it invokes cvs.exe without going via bash. On a Win9x machine you need to edit autoexec.bat using Windows/system/Sysedit. You need to reboot to make the new settings take effect. You need two chunks of software other than GHC itself: the Cygwin toolchain, and Perl. Here's how to get and install them. GHC depends at the moment on the cygwin tools to operate, which dresses up the Win32 environment into something more UNIX-like. (notably, it provides gcc, as and ld), so you'll need to install these tools first. You also need Cygwin to use CVS. Important grungy information about Cygwin: Cygwin doesn't deal well with filenames that include spaces. "Program Files" and "Local files" are common gotchas. Cygwin implements a symbolic link as a text file with some magical text in it. So programs that don't use Cygwin's I/O libraries won't recognise such files as symlinks. In particular, programs compiled by GHC are meant to be runnable without having Cygwin, so they don't use the Cygwin library, so they don't recognise symlinks. Here's how to install Cygwin. Download cygwin, beta20.1 (full.exe) from sourceware.cygnus.com Install this somewhere locally. Create the following directories (if they aren't already there): c:/etc c:/bin c:/usr/local/bin (using mkdir -p /bin, etc.) Copy bash.exe from the bin directory of the cygwin tree (cygwin-b20/H-i586-cygwin32/bin/bash.exe) to /bin as sh.exe. You might think that it was easier to use bash directly from it original Cygwin directory, but (a) some UNIX utils have got /bin/sh hardwired in, and (b) the path following #! is limited to 32 characters. If you're an Emacs user and want to be able to run bash from within a shell buffer, see the NT Emacs home page for instructions on how to set this up. The following environment variables must be set: PATH System Add C:\cygnus\cygwin-b20\H-i586-cygwin32\bin. bash needs this, and when it is invoked from /bin it can't find it. c:/bin and c:/usr/local/bin should also be added. SHELL User c:/bin/sh. HOME User Set to point to your home directory. This is where, for example, bash will look for your .bashrc file. MAKE_MODE User Set to UNIX. If you don't do this you get very weird messages when you type `make', such as: /c: /c: No such file or directory TMPDIR User Set to c:/tmp. For some reason, Win2k invisibly sets this variable to point to a temporary directory in your profile, that contains embedded spaces. If GHC sees the TMPDIR variable set, it tries to use it for temporary files, but Cygwin doesn't grok filenames with spaces, so disaster results. Furthermore, it seems that TMPDIR must be set to a directory in the same file system in which you invoke GHC. Otherwise you get very werid messages when you invoke GHC, such as: does not exist Action: openFile Reason: file does not exist /tmp/ghc11068.cpp We think this is due to a bug in Cygwin. The driver script is written in Perl, so you'll need to have this installed too. However, the ghc binary distribution includes a perl binary for you to make use of, should you not already have a cygwin compatible one. Note: GHC does not work with the ActiveState port of perl. Download a GHC distribution: ghc-4.045—InstallShield installer, 10M: http or ftp (The version number may change.) It is packaged up using an installer that should be familiar-looking to Windows users. Unpack and double click on setup.exe. Note: The cygwin support for long file names containing spaces is not 100%, so make sure that you install ghc in a directory that has no embedded spaces (i.e., resist the temptation to put it in /Program Files/!) When the installer has completed its job, you may delete the ghcInstall directory. When the installer has completed, make sure you add the location of the ghc bin/ directory to your path (i.e. /path/to/wherever/ghc-4.05/bin ). You need to do this in order to bring the various GHC DLLs into scope; if not, then you need to copy the DLLs into a directory that is (the system directory, for example). Note: In case you haven't got perl already installed, you will have to manually copy the perl.exe binary from the ghc bin/ into your /bin directory before continuing—the installer will not currently do this. ghc-4.045 - gzip'ed tarfile, 7.5M: http or ftp A `normal' GHC binary distribution packaged up as a compressed tar file. If you're already accustomed to installing and using GHC distributions on other platforms, the setup should be familiar to you, I hope. Unpack and read the INSTALL file contained in the distribution for instructions on how to set it up. Notice that the top directory of the distribution contains (rather clumsily) a perl binary (version 5.005_02). If you haven't already got a working perl, install this somewhere along your path too. Make sure that you set all the environment variables described above under Cygwin installation, including TMPDIR To test the fruits of your labour, try now to compile a simple Haskell program: bash$ cat main.hs module Main(main) where main = putStrLn "Hello, world!" bash$ /path/to/the/ghc/bin/directory/ghc-4.05 -o main main.hs .. bash$ ./main Hello, world! bash$ OK, assuming that worked, you're all set. Go forth and write useful Haskell programs :-) If not, consult the installation FAQ (); if that still doesn't help then please report the problems you're experiencing (see ). Further information on using GHC under Windows can be found in Sigbjørn Finne's pages. Invoking ghc doesn't seem to do anything, it immediately returns without having compiled the input file. One cause of this is that /bin/sh is missing. To verify, open up a bash session and type ls -l /bin/sh.exe. If sh.exe is reported as not being there, copy bash.exe (which you'll find inside the cygwin installation tree as H-i586-cygwin32/bin/bash.exe) to /bin/sh.exe. All being well, ghc should then start to function. When compiling up the Hello World example, the following happens: bash$ /ghc/ghc-4.05/bin/ghc-4.05 main.hs <stdin>:0:25: Character literal '{-# LINE 1 "main.hs" -}' too long <stdin>:0:25: on input: "'" bash$ or bash$ /ghc/ghc-4.05/bin/ghc-4.05 main.hs Program too big fit into memory under NT bash$ The cause of this is that you're using a version of perl that employs the Microsoft cmd/command shell when launching sub-processes to execute system() calls. The GHC driver really needs a perl which uses a `UNIX'y shell instead, so make sure that the version you're using is of an compatible ilk. In particular, if perl -v reports that you've got a copy of the (otherwise fine) port of perl done by ActiveState, you're in trouble. If you're stuck with an incompatible perl, the GHC installation comes with a very basic perl binary for you to use. Simply copy it into the /bin directory. Notice that copying perl.exe into /bin will not cause the GHC install to suddenly start functioning. If you don't want to re-run the InstallShield installer again, you need to edit the following files within the directory tree that the installer created: bin/ghc-4.xx -- where xx is the minor release number bin/stat2resid bin/hstags lib/mkdependHS For each of these files, you need to edit the first line from instead saying #!/path/to/your/other/perl/install to #!/bin/perl. Once that is done, try compiling up the Hello, World example again. Should you want to pick up a complete installation of a ghc-friendly port of perl instead, a cygwin port is available. System.getArgs always return the empty list, i.e. the following program always prints “[]”: module Main(main) where import qualified System main = System.getArgs >>= print This is a bug with the RTS DLL that comes with ghc-4.03. To fix, upgrade to ghc-4.05. This is a slightly sore point at the moment, because the GHC team has been unable to strike a good balance between having a documentation system that is easy to maintain and one that is widely available. We use the DocBook DTD, which is widely used; however, shrink-wrapped distributions of DocBook are few and far between, and getting it to work out of the box is a nightmare. We settled on the Cygnus DocBook tools; however, these are only available as Red Hat RPMs, and hence at the moment the documentation can only be built on systems which can use RPMs (i.e. most versions of Linux). Sorry about that. We will probably add pre-built documentation to future source distributions (it's already in binary distributions, of course) until the situation is sorted out (either we bite the bullet and have our own version of the DocBook tools, or a more portable distribution is made available). See the Building Guide for details of what to install to get the DocBook tools and how to build the documentation (it's done by the build system, but just isn't part of a normal build).