Latest GHC / recommended tools for Win7?

#1

Hi all! I know that Windows 7 is EOL and fully unsupported / without even security updates, etc. I know it’s a very bad idea to use it.

That said, I have a friend who develops software for network-isolated research lab equipment that is stuck at Windows 7, and he’d like to develop a simple installable executable GUI app possibly using Haskell.

I couldn’t find a compatibility matrix or anything indicating when support for Windows 7 may have dropped for various tools; all I could find was the release notes for GHC 9.2.2 saying that Windows 7 support was restored there.

I’m curious what you would all recommend for this scenario, assuming that upgrading out of Windows 7 is not an option. Is there a version of GHC, Haskell Platform, Stack, etc. that you would recommend?

#2

From Haskell download site under " Windows 64-bit (x86_64)" -
"This is compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista and later. It also includes support for compiling C++ files. "

#3

This is compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista and later. It also includes support for compiling C++ files.

All recent releases say that, including 9.2.8, 9.4.8, 9.6.6 and 9.8.3.

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#4

From Stack’s perspective, a difficulty is that when machines with Windows 7 ceased to be readily available, it became difficult to work out if a particular version of Stack for Windows worked on Windows 7 or not. You may have to experiment with sufficiently old versions available at: Releases · commercialhaskell/stack · GitHub.

However, be aware of the following: the Stack-supplied MSYS2 is fetched (if MSYS2 is not already available) (by default) by reference to the default setup-info dictionary. Current MSYS2 do not support Windows 7. Today, that default dictionary has (extract):

msys2:
    windows64:
        version: "20240727"
        url: "https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stackage-content/releases/download/msys2-20240727/msys2-20240727-x86_64.tar.xz"
        content-length: 71943628
        sha256: 175323d3e33cb70b6c5cf1fd17f0a8e666c0a303fb68cd519fda6372f54e829e

So, you will need to specify a setup-info in your Stack configuration that specifies the location of a MSYS2 that itself supports Windows 7. In that regard, as indicated by the extract, the versions of MSYS2 that Stack has made use of over the years are set out at: Releases · commercialhaskell/stackage-content · GitHub.

(EDIT: package ansi-terminal dropped support for legacy Windows requiring emulation from ansi-terminal >= 1.0. So anything built against those versions - including Stack versions - will likely not work as intended on Windows 7.)

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#5

Perhaps MicroHs Haskell is a worthy alternative in this situation, since it should be much simpler to bootstrap. That said, I’m not aware of how GHC fares in Windows 7 – maybe someone knows how to make it work.