Re: Trying to port nhc to a mobile platform

Malcolm Wallace <[email protected]> Mon, 28 May 2007 14:13:16 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.haskell.nhc.user
Organization Dept of Computer Science, University of York
Message-ID <[email protected]>
pierric <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi. Everyone. Recently an idea came up to my mind that I want to port
> nhc to my nds(a handheld game console). There is a already a tiny
> linux system on it. So the problem now is to cross compile the nhc on
> my laptop.

Sounds like a fun project.  I assume that the Linux system on your
Nintendo includes at least the Gnu C compiler, a filesystem, and a few
shell utilities?  (If not, then you won't get very far.)

And actually, you are unlikely to need your laptop to prepare the build
for NDS, at least if nothing goes wrong.

> Comparing with other three haskell system, I think nhc is
> the most lightweight, and it can be built from bootstrap.

Yes, it should be fairly straightforward.

> But sadly I
> don't know where to begin. Can someone give any help? some detail
> steps or maybe some key points that I must know.

The easiest place to begin is by downloading a tarfile distribution from
    http://haskell.org/nhc98/download.html
Transfer it onto your DS machine, unpack it, then follow the usual
installation instructions:

    cd nhc98-1.18
    ./configure --buildwith=gcc
    make basic

If there are any errors during the build, then ask for more help on this
list (or the nhc-bugs@ list).  The most likely thing to break is that
the CPU type is unknown, in which case a few tweaks to some C
preprocessor conditionals is all that is usually required to fix it.)

Regards,
    Malcolm