[mokus]

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)

[dllthomas]

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.

[jarrett]

> Maybe the Mac/Haskell overlap is just too small?

Probably so. Though I would suggest that the neither one is a small niche in itself. Mac especially--it's the favored platform for every developer I know except one. Yes, it's less popular outside tech circles (probably due in part to the price).

Imagine this scenario: There are tons of Mac users who want to learn Haskell. They try it, but can't install libraries. The Haskell community never hears from them; one could say the system failed silently. Meanwhile, Linux works fine, and the Haskell-Linux community keeps growing.

So perhaps there's a self-reinforcing Linux-centric bias in the developer population.

[dllthomas]

I wouldn't at all say either is "a small niche." As niches go, they're both pretty large... I actually have no idea how the prevalence of Mac differs inside and outside tech circles. It's a decided minority in every case, with Windows still dominant and likely Linux still dominated (though I'm far less confident about that in dev circles than I used to be). For what it's worth, virtually every developer I know well enough to know what they prefer uses either Linux or Windows, with the exception of my mother who decided some few years back that Mac is "Unix enough" now. I expect that there's a lot of clustering, though, and neither of our experience represents a uniform sampling.

Your general point - that it's likely self-reinforcing - is certainly strong. I'd even expect it to be exacerbated a bit in this case by it being GUI things in particular showing issues, where (at the risk of stereotyping) there is probably a correlation between those who prefer a Mac and those who prefer a GUI.

[jarrett]

> virtually every developer I know well enough to know what they prefer uses either Linux or Windows

Interesting. It must be clustered, as you say.

I use a Mac largely because there are a handful of professional apps that don't run on Linux. (Otherwise, I'd probably go with Mac hardware and a Linux OS.) Which implies that the demands of my industry is what pushed me (and perhaps the people I know) onto Macs.

> there is probably a correlation between those who prefer a Mac and those who prefer a GUI.

It's not so much that I personally prefer a GUI. (I don't, in general.) It's that I make a lot of software for other people, so GUIs aren't a matter of preference but of professional obligation. Also, there are certain applications I'd like to do where a GUI is pretty much the only sensible option: Design tools, certain types of games, etc.