How I install Haskell under Linux ? - a bug in the official doc?

1
votes

I would like to start with Haskell and I am at this page, the page clearly says

Get and install GHC 7.6.3 prior to building the platform

but if you click the link to GHC 7.6.3 ( the published version at this point in time )

Stop!

For most users, we recommend installing the Haskell Platform instead of GHC. The current Haskell Platform release includes a recent GHC release as well as some other tools (such as cabal), and a larger set of libraries that are known to work together.

What should I do ? I'm interested in using Haskell in conjunction with C++11, so I'm particularly interested in building the interpreter and the essential libraries from the source and what is the best way to use Haskell in general, if Haskell provides more than 1 version of the interpreter and what are all the possible solutions, this informations do not help me in finding a way.

I'm under Ubuntu 13.10 amd64 and I would like to know what is the best way to start with Haskell .

2
c++linuxhaskellc++11
Why aren't you using packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=haskell-platform, linked from that page? – Louis Wasserman
@LouisWasserman stackoverflow.com/questions/20317458/… – user2485710
GHC - the Haskell compiler that pretty much everyone uses right now - is written in Haskell, so you need a Haskell compiler to compile GHC. Which means, you'll probably need GHC. If you wanted to go at this the hard way, you could go back to some haskell compiler that was written in C - possibly an early version of GHC, not sure though - and work your way up from there. That's gonna take you a long time though. Like, really long. – Cubic
Haskell doesn't bind to C++11 at all. It can bind to C, and you can write a C compatibility layer in C++. Or, you can generate C++ code from Haskell. Two completely different scenarios. In neither case do you need particular control over the Haskell compiler; you certainly don't need to build that from source. – leftaroundabout
@user2485710 Haskell isn't a scripting language. There's an interpreter supplied with GHC, but it's primary use is for development purposes. Normally, you'd compile your Haskell code to an executable. There's a FFI to interact with C code, there's no direct way to interact with C++ code. You can write a C bridge to your C++ code though and use that. – Cubic

2 Answers

1
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The Linux source distribution of the Haskell Platform does not include GHC. So if you actually want to build everything from source, then you need GHC separately first.

But most people get the platform via a binary installer, or, on Linux, via their distribution. So you should check whether Ubuntu 13.10 has the Haskell Platform, and it seems it does, so I recommend you start from there.

1
votes

You can also try out https://www.fpcomplete.com/. The website has interactive tutorials and allows you to run haskell without having to install it on your machine.