27 Mar 2015
We're happy to announce the availability of MinGHC for GHC 7.10. MinGHC is a minimal GHC installer for Windows, consisting of:
- GHC itself
- cabal-install
- MSYS, which is necessary for building some packages such as network
MinGHC came out of some conversation Neil Mitchell and I had at ICFP last year about pain on the Windows platform, and consists of a lot of good code by Neil, and some hacky attempts by me at understanding Windows installer processes. While this project predates the Commercial Haskell SIG by a few months, it's essentially the first project undertaken by the group.
While MinGHC is relatively young, it's also a minimalistic product, simply repackaging and serving upstream components unmodified. Additionally, it has become the recommended installer by quite a few sites, and therefore has already received significant testing. Also, due to its minimal nature, it's easy to pop out new releases of MinGHC. For example, this current release was made less than two hours after GHC itself was released!
While this project is stable, additional testers and contributors are certainly welcome. Please check out the Github project page for more information.