Setting up Haskell on Windowss

Why do that and not use Haskell Platform instead?

From what I have experienced so far, Haskell Platform falls behind the latest GHC release, and ships with Packages that one might not need.

Essentially there are two things needed:

• GHC - Haskell’s compiler and interactive environment.
• Cabal - Haskell’s build system, which also doubles as a package manager.

GHC

• Download GHC for Windows from here.
• Extract GHC contents to a folder and add to PATH:
  • \ghc-x.y.z\bin

Cabal

• Find out here which version of Cabal matches the GHC version you downloaded
• Download Cabal for Windows from here
  • You need to find a MinGW version, e.g. cabal-install-x.y.z-x86_64-unknown-mingw32
• Extract Cabal executable to a folder and add that folder to PATH
• Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and execute:
  • cabal-x.y.z.exe install
  • cabal-x.y.z.exe update

And that’s it!

–

Did it work out?

Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) window or a Git Bash window and execute:

$ which ghc
/c/ghc-x.y.z-x86_64-unknown-mingw32/ghc-x.y.z/bin/ghc

$ which cabal
/c/cabal-install-x.y.z-x86_64-unknown-mingw32/cabal

In the same command prompt executing ghci should launch GHCi (Haskell’s interactive environment):

GHCi, version x.y.z: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done.
Loading package base ... linking ... done.
>

To get the > character show up in the prompt, add the following to C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\ghc\ghci.conf:

:set prompt "> "

That’s it - Happy Haskell Programming (on Windows)!