Development snapshots

For most users, we recommend the most recent major release (see below): it has been extensively tested, and is available pre-packaged for many environments. For those wishing to experiment with Hugs as it develops, we occasionally provide snapshot source distributions generated from the development version. These should build, but may contain experimental changes that have not completely stabilized. In the future, we plan to generate these automatically and regularly. You can also access the CVS version, but that is even less stable, and needs more tools to build.

September 2006 release

A new minor release of Hugs, fixing a few bugs with the May 2006 release, and with libraries roughly matching the forthcoming GHC 6.6 release.

May 2006 release

In addition to numerous bug fixes, changes since the interim release in March 2005 include:

• The default current module is now the empty module Hugs.
• Compatibility libraries are present, but no longer included on the default search path. They will be removed in the next release.
• Rewritten graphical Windows interface (contributed by Neil Mitchell).

Mar 2005 release

This interim release is primarily targeted at Unix systems to gain experience with new features. The new Cabal-based library build system has the potential to make building on Windows easier, but it's not there yet. Volunteers welcome.

User-visible changes in this new release are:

• The Char type and the Char module now support Unicode as specified in the Haskell 98 Report (contributed by Dmitry Golubovsky).
• The default current module is now the empty module Hugs.Base instead of the Prelude.
• The new -X option groups several options into one argument.
• The syntax of the ffihugs command has changed: the +G and +L options are gone, and a new +i option can be used to specify include files.
• Hugs now has basic support for Cabal.
• Numerous bug fixes.

Nov 2003 release

We are pleased to announce a new major release of Hugs98. The most important features of this release are:

• More of the Haskell hierarchical libraries, including imprecise exceptions and unboxed arrays, giving greater compatibility with GHC. For now, compatibility with the old libraries is provided by stub modules, but users are encouraged to migrate to the new libraries.

• The Double type is now double-precision on most architectures.

• The -e, -f, -i, -N, -W and -X options are gone, as is the :project command.

• Integrated .NET support (on Windows).

• The beginnings of a User's Guide (still somewhat incomplete).

Nov 2002 release

We are pleased to announce a new major release of Hugs98. The most important features of this release are:

• Much improved FFI support (contributed by Alastair Reid), bringing Hugs really very close to the Haskell FFI specification.

• Adoption of a significant subset of GHC's hierarchical libraries (contributed by Ross Paterson).

• An (allegedly) complete implementation of the Haskell98 module system (Sigbjorn Finne).

Most reported bugs have also been fixed; however, some issues still remain. See Hugs Bugs & Features for further information.

Dec 2001 release

The most important features of this release are:

• The incompatibilities between Hugs and the Haskell Graphics Library have been fixed, and binaries for the HGL are now available on the Hugs download page.

• The missing standard libraries Directory, CPUTime, Time and Locale have been added along with a complete implementation of Haskell98 IO.

• Hugs is now delivered with most of the hslibs libraries installed in the lib/exts/ directory. The added modules cover the Edison, Parsec, HaXml, QuickCheck, concurrent, monad, and html subdirectories of hslibs.

• The :set option now refuses the user to set a module search path that doesn't contain the Prelude. This is to protect users from accidentally rendering their Hugs setups unusable, especially so on Windows machines where the options are persisted to the Registry.

• MacOS X is now one of the supported unix ports, with pre-built binaries available on the download page.

• Experimental support is provided for hierarchical module names, where a module name A.B.C is mapped onto the file path A/B/C{.hs,.lhs} and appended to each of the path prefixes in HUGSPATH until the name of a readable file is found.