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2006-05-22

• Hugs 2006. Ross Paterson announced a new major release of Hugs, including an installer for Windows and a new WinHugs interface. It is available from the Hugs page.

• Linspire Chooses Haskell for Core OS Development. Clifford Beshers announced that the OS team at Linspire, Inc. is standardizing on Haskell as their preferred language for core OS development. Much of the infrastructure is being written in Haskell, including the Debian package builder (aka autobuilder). Other tools such as ISO builders, package dependency checkers are in progress. The goal is to make a tight, simple set of tools that will let developers contribute to Freespire, based on Debian tools whenever possible.

• lambdaFeed. Manuel Chakravarty released lambdaFeed -- lambdas for all! lambdaFeed is an RSS 2.0 feed generator. It reads news items - in a non-XML, human-friendly format - distributed over multiple channels and renders them into the RSS 2.0 XML format understood by most news aggregators as well as into HTML for inclusion into web pages. Source is available in darcs. Check it out.

• Milfoh, an image to texture loading library. Maurizio Monge announced he has put together a very small library, using SDL_image (and a bare minimun of SDL), to load image files as opengl textures. More information here.

• Haskell Charting Library. Tim Docker released his Haskell 2D charting library. It's still at quite an early stage, but already it has:

  • Line charts, points charts, fills, and combinations.
  • Automatic layout sizing and adjustment.
  • Auto scaling of axis ranges
  • Extensible to support new plot types
  • Uses the cairo graphics library for output
  and more. Further information and a darcs repo.

• Edison 1.2RC4. Robert Dockins announced the 4th release candidate for Edison 1.2. Edison is a library of efficient data structures for Haskell.

• Collections pre-release. Jean-Philippe Bernardy announced an alpha release of the new collections package he (and others) have been working on. It's still far from perfect, but I hope it's already a good choice for many use cases of collection data structures.

• Haskell Graph Automorphism Library. In a busy week, Jean-Philippe also released HGAL 1.2 (Haskell Graph Automorphism Library), a Haskell implementation of Brendan McKay's algorithm for graph canonic labeling and automorphism group. (aka Nauty). Improvements over the previous release include a faster algorithm implementation and the library is now cabalised.

• Darcs 1.0.7. Tommy Pettersson announced the release of darcs 1.0.7, containing a few bug fixes, and some new features.

2006-05-08

• hmake. Malcolm Wallace released version 3.11 of hmake, the compiler-independent project-building tool for Haskell programs. It automates recompilation analysis, based on import declarations in your files, to rebuild only those modules that are impacted by a change. It is rather like ghc's --make mode, but faster, less memory intensive, and it works with any compiler (e.g. hbc, nhc98).

• cpphs. In a busy week, Malcolm also released version 1.2 of cpphs, the in-Haskell implementation of the C pre-processor. The major change in this release is that the source files have been re-arranged into a cabal-ised hierarchical library namespace, so you can use cpp functionality from within your own code, in addition to the stand-alone utility.

• Cabal 1.1. Duncan Coutts (as the new Cabal release manager) announced that Cabal-1.1.4, the version shipped with GHC 6.4.2 is now available to download as a separate tarball. There is also a new mailing list for Cabal development discussion including patch review. This is also where patches sent via "darcs send" will end up. The Cabal team would also like to take the opportunity to invite people to get involved in Cabal development, either new features or squashing annoying bugs.

• DownNova-0.1. Lemmih released downNova, a program designed for automating the process of downloading TV series from mininova.org. Written in Haskell, it will scan your downloaded files to find out what your interests are and download missing/new episodes to your collection. Advanced classification techniques are used to interpret the file names and 'downNova' will correctly extract series name, season number, episode number and episode title in nigh all cases.

• Student SoC Application Deadline is rapidly approaching. Paolo Martini encouraged students to apply to google, using the student application form, and Haskell.org is looking forward to the several dozen applications we hope to receive.

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