Visual Haskell 2008/2010

Question

Does Visual Haskell for Visual Studio 2008/2010 exist? Or what are the alternatives to try it?

EDIT: I've got a lot of alternatives but it seems that there is no Visual Haskell right now.

Answer 1

Hmm, there certainly don't seem to be binaries for anything since VS .NET 2005... maybe #haskell knows something about what happened to it?

Answer 2

Not sure if this meets your criteria for what is considered an alternative (looking for a language or an IDE?), but F# is a fully-Microsoft-supported (and VS2008/2010 supported) functional language for .NET. It's more ML-like than Haskell-like, but it's certainly closer to Haskell than, say VB :)

Answer 3

You could create a makefile project and specify a custom build command line. However, code coloring and automatic statement completion won't work.

Answer 4

In late 2005, Visual Studio support for Haskell was "almost finished" by a Russian student who had interned at Microsoft. Shortly thereafter, the student dropped out of sight, and the project was never finished. There have been periodic conversations at GHC Central about trying to bring it back, but I think there is just too much else going on: big focus on parallelism, new back end, new optimizer, LLVM back end, maybe a new code generator one day.

Maybe with Haskell Prime finally stable at "Haskell 2010", when the report comes out someone will be willing to do a front end for PLT Scheme, or maybe someone in the Netherlands will do an IDE for Helium.

Answer 5

Leksah is something I've heard a lot of good things about. It's a Haskell IDE written in Haskell. I've never used it, so I can't promise anything. However, it is in active development and some people do use it, so it can't be too bad.

I know you're probably already tired of hearing this, but it would really be worthwhile to invest a day or two getting familiar with Emacs or Vim (I'm biased toward Emacs). It's not very hard to get a working Haskell set up in Emacs, as there is a very good mode for it available. The best thing about learning an editor like Emacs is that once you're familiar with it, it's always there. You can use it to write code in all of your favorite languages. I'm happy I learned to use Emacs just so I don't have to use a different IDE for nearly every language I use, and I don't always have to depend on an IDE, especially considering the fact that some languages don't even have IDEs. Newer ones, anyways.

Answer 6

There is an Eclipse plug-in for Haskell. It depends on a slightly divergent version of Scion (!) but seems to work. However, I've only tried very simple tasks with it. Good luck! http://eclipsefp.sourceforge.net/

Answer 7

To the best of my knowledge there is no currently published or publicly active project to update the existing visual haskell to newer versions.

The code for visual haskell is written in Haskell and talks via COM to visual studio. Now the problem is, that even if you update the com wrappers to be compatible with the new visual studios you'd still be stuck using a ghc 6.6 simply because it relied on internal structures of the compiler to work, some of which have already been removed from 6.8 going forward.

So any effort on this part will require a complete rewrite of plugin.

Now the good new is I am busy writing a version for visual studio 2010 (sorry no 2008) but supposedly I could release it as a standalone isolated shell for those who don't have vs 2010 (need to check the license more closely).

I'm also taking a different approach in the hope that it'll be more maintainable in the future. e.g. Not writing the interaction with visual studio in Haskell but using C#, not hardcode to the compiler but use the new API etc.

I only have time to work on it in the weekends, So I project (no promises) that I'll have a first version out around july.

Answer 8

In late 2005, Visual Studio support for Haskell was "almost finished" by a Russian student who had interned at Microsoft. Shortly thereafter, the student dropped out of sight, and the project was never finished.

Norman, the student is Bulgarian and not Russian. About the question what happened after that, the answer is that this is too much work to be done only in the weekends or after work. No one disappears without sign, he is still around.

Answer 9

Looks like there is a new Visual Haskell implementation in the works.