GHC under Wine

GHC runs fairly well under WINE. Here's a guide on how to get it working.

Installation

First, get the latest version of WINE from http://www.winehq.com/site/download and install it.

Next, grab the latest windows version of GHC from http://haskell.org/ghc/download.html

Using the precompiled version of ghc requires adding MSI support to WINE. Luckily, work has been done on developing a native version of MSI for wine. Get it at http://wiki.winehq.org/NativeMsi and follow the instructions to install it.

Now go to the directory where you've put your download of ghc. install it:

wine msiexec.exe /i ghc-VERSION.msi

This should start up the installer and walk you through the installation.

Once this is all done, you should be good to start using GHC. You might want to add GHC to your path. To do this fire up regedit:

wine regedit

and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->System->CurrentControlSet->Control->Session Manager->Environment->Path. Add GHC's installation to the pathlist. It will probably be something like C:\ghc\ghc-VERSION\bin

Testing

Create a simple haskell program to compile. Hello World examples are good. Try compiling it:

$ wine ghc -o hello --make HelloWorld.hs
Chasing modules from: HelloWorld.hs
Compiling Main             ( HelloWorld.hs, HelloWorld.o )
fixme:msvcrt:MSVCRT__sopen : pmode 0x01b6 ignored
fixme:msvcrt:MSVCRT__sopen : pmode 0x01b6 ignored
Linking ...
Wine exited with a successful status

And try running it:

$ wine hello
Hello, world!
Wine exited with a successful status

If it all works well then you should hopefully be able to compile your haskell programs for windows from wine.

Known Problems

Windows DLL's

wine's builtin msvcrt.dll may not work nicely with compilation of more complicated programs. To get around this a native version of the DLL can be found at places such as http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/index.shtml . Disclaimer: I am unsure of what the legal implications of using this DLL without a licensed copy of windows might be.

IO issues

hSetBuffering doesn't seem to work well from terminals. This creates problems with GHCi:

$ wine ghci
WARNING: GHCi invoked via 'ghci.exe' in *nix-like shells (cygwin-bash, in particular)
         doesn't handle Ctrl-C well; use the 'ghcii.sh' shell wrapper instead
   ___         ___ _
  / _ \ /\  /\/ __(_)
 / /_\// /_/ / /  | |      GHC Interactive, version 6.4.2, for Haskell 98.
/ /_\\/ __  / /___| |      http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
\____/\/ /_/\____/|_|      Type :? for help.

Loading package base-1.0 ... linking ... done.
<stdin>: hSetBuffering: failed (failed to set buffering)
Wine exited with a successful status