Getting the Source

There are a few possibilities, in order of increasing currency, dependencies and risk.

Major releases

If you only want to use Hugs, not modify it, your best bet is to download a recent  major release.

Source snapshots

We occasionally make available  snapshot source distributions (which include the libraries). These require fewer tools to build than the development version, and have had some testing, but may not be as stable as major releases.

An alternative (unofficial) source snapshot as of 28 September 2008 is available  here. This Google Code project has been created to host Hugs source snapshots oriented towards experiments with  Yhc Core generation, a feature recently added to Hugs. There is no established schedule to release more snapshots, but they may appear as new achievements are done in the said direction. The same build instructions as for official Hugs development snapshots, apply except that darcs is not needed to download libraries: they are included with snapshot.

See the  Corehugs project home page for more details.

Development version

To build the development version, you'll need gcc, bison, happy, darcs, various Unix tools and an Internet connection. The Hugs code is managed with  darcs, as are the libraries and some other tools.

The steps to build from darcs are:

  1. Check out hugs98. If you don't already have access to the Haskell darcs repository, you can get a read-only copy as follows: 
    darcs get --set-scripts-executable --partial http://darcs.haskell.org/hugs98
    If you intend to submit patches, you should omit the --partial, but it will take quite a bit longer.
  2. Move to hugs98 and say 
    make
    This includes fetching the libraries from darcs, so you need to be connected.
  3. You can now run Hugs in place with 
    HUGSDIR=hugsdir src/hugs
    To run the test suite, say 
    make check
    To check the libraries, move into libraries and say 
    make LibStatus
  4. When you're confident with it, you can go back to the hugs98 directory and say 
    make install

Please report any bugs in the darcs version to the  cvs-hugs mailing list, which also carries commit messages and development discussion.