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by sgerrand 4425 days ago
Have you looked at the Haskell QML bindings? They generally work for cross platform requirements.

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hsqml-0.1.1/docs/Graphics...

2 comments

Yes. It does not compile on my Mavericks machine. Same with every graphics package I've tried.
I do try and make sure that HsQML works on Windows and MacOS in addition to Linux. Although, I admit I haven't tried MacOS 10.9 as my Mac is still running 10.8.

I don't think I've ever been contacted concerning issues with Windows or MacOS, which is probably indictative of the size of the user base combined with probability of any one person deciding to go to the effort. On the other hand, I have fixed genuine build failures for Linux users because the platform is diverse enough that it "worked on my system" but not theirs.

In any case, my contact details are on the HsQML Hackage page. If you'd like to send me the error message you're seeing, I'd be happy to try and help you get it working.

Get in touch with the developers and work with them to get it building. Often times they don't have access to your platform, so just being that helps. Anything you can do on top of that is gravy.
While what you suggest is reasonable and the right thing to do, it just highlights the original point. The state of UI bindings is pretty bad.
I wasn't making any point. Fwiw, I have been able to meet my own (quite limited) gui needs in Haskell with gtk...

Edit: On reflection, I find your assertion a little strange here. Anecdotal failure to build on one particular setup doesn't seem like a particular highlighting of bad bindings.

I can add another anecdote. In almost 10 years now of using Haskell on Mac, Linux and Windows, I've never once had any success building any GUI binding for Mac OS, despite trying every one I could find (gtkhs included) at least once a year on many different OS/hardware combinations.

(unless you count HOC, but I never actually got it working as-was - I brought it back from bit-rot on a couple occasions, adding ObjC 2 support and rewriting a fair chunk of the low-level stuff, but never did find the time to update the fragile header-parsing stuff for the actual Cocoa-binding generator)

Huh. It is sounding like there's an issue with Mac GUIs, then. Maybe the Mac/Haskell overlap is just too small? Both are small-to-niche... It would probably make sense to get a group oriented around getting that fixed up. For myself, I'm meeting my needs - and both 1) more GUI apps and 2) more Mac support are almost entirely orthogonal to them, so I'm not likely to participate.
Sometimes I do. Often, if a Haskell package doesn't have a Github repo, I don't know how to contact the developers or submit a bug report. Is there a standard place on Hackage or in ghc-pkg where one can find that info?
"Is there a standard place on Hackage or in ghc-pkg where one can find that info?"

Both! It's in the ghc-pkg dump output, though there's doubtless a better way at getting at that. As for Hackage, if you just pare the above link back to https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hsqml you'll find package meta-info which includes:

    Author	Robin KAY
    Maintainer	komadori@gekkou.co.uk
    Home page	http://www.gekkou.co.uk/software/hsqml/
    Source repository	head: darcs get http://hub.darcs.net/komadori/HsQML/
I'll try installing QML on mavericks tomorrow and debugging it. Feel free to list anymore that failed to compile for you and I'll try to do the same for those.
Have you tried using cabal sandboxes to work around your build issues?
The QML bindings are great! They are still fairly new and lacking some features but it seems as though Qt5 support was just added.