The Haskell Platform 2009.2.0.1

~ Don Stewart

The Haskell Platform 2nd release (June 2009) is live!

The Platform Infrastructure Team is pleased to announce the second release of the Haskell Platform: a single, standard Haskell distribution for every system. The Haskell Platform is a blessed library and tool suite for Haskell distilled from Hackage, along with installers for a wide variety of systems. It saves developers work picking and choosing the best Haskell libraries and tools to use for a task.

What you get is specified here. Compilers, tools, a bunch of libraries for making you more interesting at cocktail parties.

With regular time-based releases, we expect the platform will grow into a rich, indispensable development environment for all Haskell projects. Distro maintainers that support the Haskell Platform can be confident they’re fully supporting Haskell as the developers intend it. Developers targetting the platform can be confident they have a trusted base of code to work with.

Please note that this is a beta release. We do not expect all the installers to work perfectly, nor every developer need met, and we would appreciate feedback.

What’s new in this release?

  • GHC 6.10.3 is now standard
  • Upgrade to network 2.2.1.1
  • Upgrade happy 1.18.4
  • editline is an explicit dependency

The last release had over 10k downloads of the windows installer, and we hope to make a similar impact with this iteration.

You can help out by packaging the platform for your distro, or reporting bugs and feature requests, or installing Haskell onto your friends’ machines. The process for adding new tools and libraries will be outlined in coming weeks.

Published by Don Stewart

Functional programmer, PhD in computer science, and ex-quantitative finance developer. I've built a lot of Haskell stuff, now trying out Rust. I'm currently working on code search for Facebook/Meta. In the past I've held engineering management and software dev roles in finance, tech and applied research. Views expressed are my own.

3 thoughts on “The Haskell Platform 2009.2.0.1”

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  3. I am curious about plans for the inclusion of a linear algebra package (e.g. HMatrix) and a plotting package (such as Chart or Gnuplot). I am considering using Haskell as the language for a course on computational neuroscience. This is the sort of course that is usually taught using matlab/octave or python/java. However, I think Haskell would be preferable since the code these beginning students would write would look more like the equations they would be reading about (most of them come from a psychology background and don’t know any programming languages – so why not start with Haskell?). If I could tell them to install the Haskell Platform and know it had all the packages they would need, it probably work.

    So, I guess this comment is really more of a feature request.

    Thanks for all your hard work.

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