Haskell Platform

Haskell platform

Developer(s)	Haskell Platform Infrastructure Team ^[1]
Stable release	2014.2.0.0 / August 2014 (2014-08)
Operating system	portable
License	BSD
Website	The Haskell Platform

The Haskell Platform is a collection of software packages, tools and libraries that create a common platform for using and developing applications in Haskell. With the Haskell Platform, Haskell follows the same principle as Python: "Batteries included".^[2]

Motivation

“

The quality of a programming language itself is only one component in the ability of application writers to get the job done. Programming languages can succeed or fail based on the breadth and quality of their library collection.^[2]

”

The Haskell Platform aims to unify Haskell development tools into a single package, consisting of a compiler, compiling tools and many standard libraries, therefore making it easier to develop and deploy full-featured Haskell-driven applications.

Packages included

Currently it consists of:^[3]

GHC, Haskell's flagship compiler
The GHC-Profiler
GHCi, GHCs bytecode-interpreter
The GHCi-Debugger ^[4]
Alex, a lexer generator, similar to Lex
Happy, a parser generator, similar to Yacc
Cabal, a package manager
Haddock, a documentation tool
hsc2hs, a preprocessor for binding Haskell to C code, allowing C libraries to be used from Haskell
various libraries, such as zlib, cgi and OpenGL

Deployment

It is available for Ubuntu 10.10,^[5] Arch Linux,^[6]^[7]FreeBSD,^[8] Gentoo Linux (x86-64 and x86),^[9] Fedora,^[10] Debian (stable) ^[11] and NixOS. One-click installers exist for Mac OS X^[12] (only Intel) and Microsoft Windows.^[13]

Versions

The Haskell Platform aims at a 6-months release cycle.^[14]

2009.2

Included GHC 6.10. It is also the version considered to be included into Debian-stable.^[11]

2009.4

The second major release in 2009.^[15]

2010.1

Since 2010 the Haskell Platform is no longer considered beta, including GHC 6.12, featuring extensions from Haskell 2010. With this release 64-bit support on Mac OS X Snow Leopard was fixed.^[12]

2010.2

First non-beta release of 2010

2010.4

Second major release of 2010.

2011.2

First stable release of 2011, including GHC 7.0.

2012.2

First stable release of 2012, including GHC 7.4.1.

2012.4

Second release of 2012, including GHC 7.4.2.

2013.2

First stable release of 2013, including GHC 7.6.3.

2014.2

First stable release of 2014, includes GHC 7.8.3.