The Haskell Platform 2nd release (June 2009) is live!

The Platform Infrastructure Team is pleased to announce the second release of the Haskell Platform: a single, standard Haskell distribution for every system. The Haskell Platform is a blessed library and tool suite for Haskell distilled from Hackage, along with installers for a wide variety of systems. It saves developers work picking and choosing the best Haskell libraries and tools to use for a task.

What you get is specified here. Compilers, tools, a bunch of libraries for making you more interesting at cocktail parties.

With regular time-based releases, we expect the platform will grow into a rich, indispensable development environment for all Haskell projects. Distro maintainers that support the Haskell Platform can be confident they’re fully supporting Haskell as the developers intend it. Developers targetting the platform can be confident they have a trusted base of code to work with.

Please note that this is a beta release. We do not expect all the installers to work perfectly, nor every developer need met, and we would appreciate feedback.

What’s new in this release?

• GHC 6.10.3 is now standard
• Upgrade to network 2.2.1.1
• Upgrade happy 1.18.4
• editline is an explicit dependency

The last release had over 10k downloads of the windows installer, and we hope to make a similar impact with this iteration.

You can help out by packaging the platform for your distro, or reporting bugs and feature requests, or installing Haskell onto your friends’ machines. The process for adding new tools and libraries will be outlined in coming weeks.