The installer that installs GHC on Win32 also sets up the file-suffix associations for ".hs" and ".lhs" files so that double-clicking them starts ghci. Be aware of that ghc and ghci do require filenames containing spaces to be escaped using quotes: c:\ghc\bin\ghci "c:\\Program Files\\Haskell\\Project.hs" If the quotes are left off in the above command, ghci will interpret the filename as two, "c:\\Program" and "Files\\Haskell\\Project.hs". By default GHC builds applications that open a console window when they start. If you want to build a GUI-only application, with no console window, use the flag -optl-mwindows in the link step. For some reason, Mingw ships with the readline library, but not with the readline headers. As a result, GHC (like Hugs) does not use readline for interactive input on Windows. You can get a close simulation by using an emacs shell buffer! Some of the standard Haskell libraries behave slightly differently on Windows. On Windows, the '^Z' character is interpreted as an end-of-file character, so if you read a file containing this character the file will appear to end just before it. To avoid this, use IOExts.openFileEx to open a file in binary (untranslated) mode or change an already opened file handle into binary mode using IOExts.hSetBinaryMode. The IOExts module is part of the lang package. The cygwin tools aim to provide a unix-style API on top of the windows libraries, to facilitate ports of unix software to windows. To this end, they introduce a unix-style directory hierarchy under some root directory (typically / is C:\cygwin\). Moreover, everything built against the cygwin API (including the cygwin tools and programs compiled with cygwin's ghc) will see / as the root of their file system, happily pretending to work in a typical unix environment, and finding things like /bin and /usr/include without ever explicitly bothering with their actual location on the windows system (probably C:\cygwin\bin and C:\cygwin\usr\include). GHC, by default, no longer depends on cygwin, but is a native windows program. It is built using mingw, and it uses mingw's ghc while compiling your Haskell sources (even if you call it from cygwin's bash), but what matters here is that - just like any other normal windows program - neither GHC nor the executables it produces are aware of cygwin's pretended unix hierarchy. GHC will happily accept either '/' or '\' as path separators, but it won't know where to find /home/joe/Main.hs or /bin/bash or the like. This causes all kinds of fun when GHC is used from within cygwin's bash, or in make-sessions running under cygwin. Don't use absolute paths in make, configure & co if there is any chance that those might be passed to GHC (or to GHC-compiled programs). Relative paths are fine because cygwin tools are happy with them and GHC accepts '/' as path-separator. And relative paths don't depend on where cygwin's root directory is located, or on which partition or network drive your source tree happens to reside, as long as you 'cd' there first. If you have to use absolute paths (beware of the innocent-looking ROOT=`pwd` in makefile hierarchies or configure scripts), cygwin provides a tool called cygpath that can convert cygwin's unix-style paths to their actual windows-style counterparts. Many cygwin tools actually accept absolute windows-style paths (remember, though, that you either need to escape '\' or convert '\' to '/'), so you should be fine just using those everywhere. If you need to use tools that do some kind of path-mangling that depends on unix-style paths (one fun example is trying to interpret ':' as a separator in path lists..), you can still try to convert paths using cygpath just before they are passed to GHC and friends. If you don't have cygpath, you probably don't have cygwin and hence no problems with it... unless you want to write one build process for several platforms. Again, relative paths are your friend, but if you have to use absolute paths, and don't want to use different tools on different platforms, you can simply write a short Haskell program to print the current directory (thanks to George Russell for this idea): compiled with GHC, this will give you the view of the file system that GHC depends on (which will differ depending on whether GHC is compiled with cygwin's gcc or mingw's gcc or on a real unix system..) - that little program can also deal with escaping '\' in paths. Apart from the banner and the startup time, something like this would also do: $ echo "Directory.getCurrentDirectory >>= putStrLn . init . tail . show " | ghci Dynamic link libraries, Win32 DLLs, Win32 On Win32 platforms, the compiler is capable of both producing and using dynamic link libraries (DLLs) containing ghc-compiled code. This section shows you how to make use of this facility. Until recently, strip didn't work reliably on DLLs, so you should test your version with care, or make sure you have the latest binutils. Unfortunately, we don't know exactly which version of binutils cured the problem (it was supposedly fixed some years ago). The default on Win32 platforms is to link applications in such a way that the executables will use the Prelude and system libraries DLLs, rather than contain (large chunks of) them. This is transparent at the command-line, so sh$ cat main.hs module Main where main = putStrLn "hello, world!" sh$ ghc -o main main.hs ghc: module version changed to 1; reason: no old .hi file sh$ strip main.exe sh$ ls -l main.exe -rwxr-xr-x 1 544 everyone 4608 May 3 17:11 main.exe* sh$ ./main hello, world! sh$ will give you a binary as before, but the main.exe generated will use the Prelude and RTS DLLs instead of linking them in statically. 4K for a "hello, world" application—not bad, huh? :-) If you want to build an executable that doesn't depend on any ghc-compiled DLLs, use the -static option to link in the code statically. Notice that you cannot mix code that has been compiled with -static and not, so you have to use the -static option on all the Haskell modules that make up your application. Making libraries into DLLs doesn't work on Windows at the moment (and is no longer supported); however, all the machinery is still there. If you're interested, contact the GHC team. Note that building an entire Haskell application as a DLL is still supported (it's just inter-DLL Haskell calls that don't work). Creating a Win32 DLL ––mk-dll Sealing up your Haskell library inside a DLL is straightforward; compile up the object files that make up the library, and then build the DLL by issuing a command of the form: ghc ––mk-dll -o foo.dll bar.o baz.o wibble.a -lfooble By feeding the ghc compiler driver the option ––mk-dll, it will build a DLL rather than produce an executable. The DLL will consist of all the object files and archives given on the command line. To create a `static' DLL, i.e. one that does not depend on the GHC DLLs, use the -static when compiling up your Haskell code and building the DLL. A couple of things to notice: Since DLLs correspond to packages (see ) you need to use -package-name dll-name when compiling modules that belong to a DLL if you're going to call them from Haskell. Otherwise, Haskell code that calls entry points in that DLL will do so incorrectly, and crash. For similar reasons, you can only compile a single module tree into a DLL, as startupHaskell needs to be able to call its initialisation function, and only takes one such argument (see ). Hence the modules you compile into a DLL must have a common root. By default, the entry points of all the object files will be exported from the DLL when using ––mk-dll. Should you want to constrain this, you can specify the module definition file to use on the command line as follows: ghc ––mk-dll -o .... -optdll--def -optdllMyDef.def See Microsoft documentation for details, but a module definition file simply lists what entry points you want to export. Here's one that's suitable when building a Haskell COM server DLL: EXPORTS DllCanUnloadNow = DllCanUnloadNow@0 DllGetClassObject = DllGetClassObject@12 DllRegisterServer = DllRegisterServer@0 DllUnregisterServer = DllUnregisterServer@0 In addition to creating a DLL, the ––mk-dll option also creates an import library. The import library name is derived from the name of the DLL, as follows: DLL: HScool.dll ==> import lib: libHScool_imp.a The naming scheme may look a bit weird, but it has the purpose of allowing the co-existence of import libraries with ordinary static libraries (e.g., libHSfoo.a and libHSfoo_imp.a. Additionally, when the compiler driver is linking in non-static mode, it will rewrite occurrence of -lHSfoo on the command line to -lHSfoo_imp. By doing this for you, switching from non-static to static linking is simply a question of adding -static to your command line. If you want to package up Haskell code to be called from other languages, such as Visual Basic or C++, there are some extra things it is useful to know. The dirty details are in the Foreign Function Interface definition, but it can be tricky to work out how to combine this with DLL building, so here's an example: Use foreign export declarations to export the Haskell functions you want to call from the outside. For example, module Adder where adder :: Int -> Int -> IO Int -- gratuitous use of IO adder x y = return (x+y) foreign export stdcall adder :: Int -> Int -> IO Int Compile it up: ghc -c adder.hs -fglasgow-exts This will produce two files, adder.o and adder_stub.o compile up a DllMain() that starts up the Haskell RTS-––a possible implementation is: #include <windows.h> #include <Rts.h> EXTFUN(__stginit_Adder); static char* args[] = { "ghcDll", NULL }; /* N.B. argv arrays must end with NULL */ BOOL STDCALL DllMain ( HANDLE hModule , DWORD reason , void* reserved ) { if (reason == DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH) { /* By now, the RTS DLL should have been hoisted in, but we need to start it up. */ startupHaskell(1, args, __stginit_Adder); return TRUE; } return TRUE; } Here, Adder is the name of the root module in the module tree (as mentioned above, there must be a single root module, and hence a single module tree in the DLL). Compile this up: ghc -c dllMain.c Construct the DLL: ghc ––mk-dll -o adder.dll adder.o adder_stub.o dllMain.o Start using adder from VBA-––here's how I would Declare it: Private Declare Function adder Lib "adder.dll" Alias "adder@8" (ByVal x As Long, ByVal y As Long) As Long Since this Haskell DLL depends on a couple of the DLLs that come with GHC, make sure that they are in scope/visible. Building statically linked DLLs is the same as in the previous section: it suffices to add -static to the commands used to compile up the Haskell source and build the DLL.