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by michaelt_ 3632 days ago
www.haskell.org didn't used to take for granted that ghc is 'the' official haskell implementation. If you look at

https://web.archive.org/web/20090129200859/http://haskell.or...

which immediately lists implementations and compare it to

https://web.archive.org/web/20100402011002/http://www.haskel...

a year later you will be reminded of the rather spectacular struggles that preceded the ghc-centrism of haskell.org . The change was closely associated with the appearance of the haskell platform, and the arguments very similar to those concerning stack and stackage. If you want paranoid theories of corrupt commercial motives in that case, I can produce several incompatible ones for you to choose among.

2 comments

YHC, Hugs, and nhc all discontinued development.

The former is now virtually uncompilable (and was never complete), Hugs is officially unmaintained, nhc hasn't seen a release since 2010 so is not under new development.

While there was discussion over this, it doesn't at all resemble the set of arguments more recently.

I won't bother to look it up, since it's not important and we probably agree on basically everything, but there were in my memory quite a few tempests in teapots about this sort of thing. It wasn't that there were other working compilers the overt ghc-centrism was dissing; the dispute was more about the desirability of distinguishing the Haskell language from the ghc implementation which pained some. No one doubted that the ghc was the going one, especially once hugs became unmaintained. Among the arguments for overt ghc-centrism were ... that it was confusing to users not to make it obvious that effectively Haskell=ghc. Similarly it was confusing to users ... that there was not something more like a system of standard libraries like those 'blessed' by the Platform. "For commercial adoption we need a clear path through all this stuff, we need clarification, blessing and decision" was one view. I remember people who were disturbed that some Haskell platform pages had you clicking an icon reading "Download Haskell" - meaning the ghc+ Haskell platform. I'd have to hunt for an example but see http://code.galois.com/darcs/haskell-platform/download-websi... for something not quite like that. For someone like dons the fastidiousness that would balk at a "Download Haskell" icon that meant "download ghc+blessed libraries" was ridiculous (rightly, I think, for the time). (Maybe they thought it should yield a pdf of the Haskell Report ...) There were actually quite a few similarities in the arguments, the difference was that no one poisoned the wells in their favor of their side by making up imaginary corrupt commercial motives. The difference was between people with a certain view of how industrial adoption was to be advanced, and a different more language-centric view. There is on reflection quite a bit of similarity between dons and Snoyman
It isn't "ghc-centrism". None of the other compilers exist any more. If you don't have any idea what you are talking about, don't create an account just to come post nonsense.