Haskell Platform

The Haskell Platform is a set of software packages, tools, and libraries that create a common platform for using and developing applications in the programming language Haskell. With the Haskell Platform, Haskell follows the same principle as Python: "Batteries included". Since 2022, the Haskell Platform has been deprecated.

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Motivation

The Haskell Platform aims to unify Haskell development tools into a single package, consisting of a compiler, compiling tools, and many standard libraries, thereby making it easier to develop and deploy full-featured Haskell-based applications.

Packages included

The last versions consist of:

Glasgow Haskell Compiler, Haskell's flagship compiler
The GHC-Profiler
GHCi, GHCs bytecode-interpreter
The GHCi-Debugger
Alex, a lexer generator, similar to Lex
Happy, a parser generator, similar to Yacc
Cabal, a package manager
Haddock, a documentation tool
hsc2hs, a preprocessor for binding Haskell to C code, allowing C libraries to be used from Haskell
various libraries, such as zlib, cgi and OpenGL

Deployment

It is available for Ubuntu, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, Gentoo Linux, Fedora Linux, Debian and NixOS. One-click installers exist for macOS and Windows.

Versions

Originally, in 2009, the Haskell Platform aimed at a periodic 6-month release cycle. Starting with 7.10.2 which was released July 29, 2015, it has followed the release cycle of GHC and has since used the same version numbering scheme.

Deprecation

In 2022, the Haskell Platform was deprecated, and is no longer an actively supported or recommended way of installing Haskell. It has been superseded by GHCup.