Talk:Glasgow Haskell Compiler

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- A cursory glance of the GHC site shows me nothing about MS Research being in current control of the codebase. Can a citation be given for this fact? Scott Paeth 05:15, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

It's still an open-source project, which is what the article says. However, MS Research employs the two primary implementors of GHC, so I think it's reasonable to mention them. Catamorphism 05:24, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "most popular and widely used"

User:Gwern wrote in a comment:

"It's also the most popular and used Haskell compiler from what I can tell. Is that mentionable?"

It's mentionable if that's verifiable -- I mean, I know that GHC is the most popular and widely used Haskell compiler, but off the top of my head I don't know what sources you would cite for that, other than the level of activity on its mailing lists and bug tracking system, and the existence of major applications that rely on GHC. Again, not facts for which I could point to a single source easily. If you can provide a source, go for it. SparsityProblem 03:11, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

We could use the Debian package popularity contest; the GHC libraries are ranked as more often installed than their Hugs counterparts[1] (strangely, Hugs itself doesn't seem to be listed, though GHC is ranked 245). --Gwern (contribs) 03:24 7 February 2007 (GMT)

I'm not shocked if Hugs doesn't have a Debian package. The effort to get GHC packaged is pretty recent. To be honest, I'm not sure how much encyclopedic significance the Debian stats have. I mean, that's only a couple hundred users there, for one thing, and I know GHC has thousands of users. The Debian stats only reflect people using one OS (albeit a popular one), and only people who download the package rather than downloading a binary distro or building GHC from source, etc. SparsityProblem 05:30, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Hugs is packaged. apt-cache show hugs:

Package: hugs
Priority: optional
Section: interpreters
Installed-Size: 3916
Maintainer: Isaac Jones <ijones@debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Source: hugs98
Version: 98.200609.21-4
Replaces: hugs98
Provides: hugs98
Depends: libhugs-base, libhugs-haskell98, libc6 (>= 2.3.6-6), libncurses5 (>= 5.4-5), libreadline5 (>= 5.2)
Recommends: libhugs-alut, libhugs-cabal, libhugs-fgl, libhugs-glut, libhugs-haskell-src, libhugs-haxml,  libhugs-hgl, libhugs-hunit, libhugs-mtl, libhugs-network, libhugs-openal, libhugs-opengl, libhugs-parsec, libhugs-quickcheck, libhugs-stm, libhugs-time, libhugs-unix, libhugs-x11, libhugs-xhtml
Suggests: haskell-mode, haskell-doc, hugs-cabal, cpphs
Conflicts: hugs98
Description: A Haskell 98 interpreter
Hugs is an interpreter for the non-strict, purely functional programming
language Haskell.  This version of Hugs, Hugs 98, supports nearly all of
the Haskell 98 specification, as well as a number of extensions.
.
The Haskell language is described by documents in the haskell-doc
package.  Other libraries are documented in the ghc6-doc package.

And I don't think any Debian users would be downloading GHC from a website or compiling it on their own (which I understand GHC strongly discourages doing since it is fairly difficult or error-prone or something). But it's too bad that an important fact can't be added. --Gwern (contribs) 05:45 7 February 2007 (GMT)

OK, I stand corrected regarding Hugs. Still, though, there are lots of people using OSes that aren't Debian, so I don't think we're justified in using the Debian statistics to show that GHC is the most popular Haskell implementation. Even so, I think it's obvious from the article as is that GHC is the oldest Haskell implementation and has the most vibrant developer community. The "History of Haskell" paper (cited in the References) comments that GHC is "probably" the most fully-featured Haskell implementation, too. Further work on the article could include expanding on GHC's features. Show, don't tell! SparsityProblem 07:31, 7 February 2007 (UTC)