skaller wrote:
On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 08:49 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
I don't think we'll be able to drop the mingw route either, mainly because while
the MS tools are free to download, they're not properly "free", and we want to
retain the ability to have a completely free distribution with no dependencies.
I'm not sure I understand this. MS tools are free to download
by anyone, but not redistributable. The binaries needed by
programs *built* by those tools are not only free to download,
they're free to redistribute, and they're less encumbered than
almost all so-called 'free software' products.
"The binaries needed by programs built by these tools...", you're referring to
the C runtime DLLs? Why does that matter?
Note I said "with no dependencies" above. A Windows native port of GHC would
require you to go to MS and download the assembler and linker separately - we
couldn't automate that, there are click-through licenses and stuff.
Hmm .. can't MS be coaxed into supplying some support to the
developers? After all, Haskell IS a major lazily evaluated
statically typed functional programming language. Why wouldn't
MS be interested in bringing GHC on board? They have an
Ocaml (called F#) now..
MS pays for Ian Lynagh, who works full time on GHC as a contractor. MS puts
roughly as much money into GHC as it does into F#, FWIW.
Cheers,
Simon
_______________________________________________
Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list
Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
