NOTE: This README is now very out of date.

                        hs-plugins

Compiler and tool support for compiling and loading, and evaluating Haskell at runtime.

The library provides a convenient interface to GHC's runtime loader and linker, letting you load compiled Haskell code.

It also provides a `make' system for compiling plugin source automagically and for combining the user's .hs file with a stub of standard declarations and syntax, saving the user from having to write standard code themselves.

It provides an `eval' function, for generating new, well-typed, compiled code from a Haskell source string.

It also provides a new variation of printf for Haskell-- a runtime generated, dynamically-typed printf.

Read the documentation in doc/ for more.

BUILDING: $ chmod +x Setup.lhs configure $ ./Setup.lhs configure --prefix=/usr/local $ ./Setup.lhs build $ ./Setup.lhs install

DEPENDENCIES:

• Requires GHC >= 6.4
• Requires Cabal

• Optional: If you are doing a lot of `merge'-related operations, and require an extended haskell parser, you can compile hs-plugins to use HSX, Niklas Broberg's Haskell parser library, available at:

  darcs get http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~d00nibro/haskell-src-exts

  To get hs-plugins to use HSX, use:

    $ mv plugins.cabal.hsx plugins.cabal
    $ ./Setup.lhs configure --enable-hsx
  

  Make sure to install HSX first though :)

• On cygwin/windows you (a) make sure the cygwin "find" is before the windows "find" on your PATH, and (b) to give the windows-style path (e.g., "c:/cygwin/usr/local") in the ./configure --prefix=foo/bar step

• 'plugs' requires a working readline library.

• If you wish to use TH in plugins, or to run load()-programs in GHCi, you require a patch to GHC's linker, that was committed into ghc 6.3, and ghc 6.2 -stable branch, and is available from 6.2.2 onwards.

• If you need to regenerate ./configure you need >= autoreconf-2.53

• The documentation relies on haddock, latex, dvips, tex2page:

    $ cd doc && make
  

EXAMPLES:

Have a look in the testsuite/ directory for many examples of how to arrange your code.

LICENSE:

This library is distributed under the terms of the LGPL. The runtime loader code is based on code written by André Pang, and others, and is distributed under the BSD-style Glasgow University license.

PORTABILITY:

Requires GHC 6.4 or greater, though most testing has be done on 6.4. The dynamic loader requires a functional GHCi implementation.

---------------------+-------------------------------------------------- Platform | Works Should work* Unknown Won't work ---------------------+-------------------------------------------------- i386--linux | X i386--freebsd | X i386--openbsd | X
powerpc-apple-darwin | X
powerpc--linux | X
sparc--solaris2 | X
ia64--linux | # i386--solaris2 | X sparc--linux | X sparc--openbsd | X i386--netbsd | X amd64-*-openbsd | X mips64-sgi-irix | X ---------------------+--------------------------------------------------

.hi file parsing is currently broken