Wx Haskell On Mac OSX

Steps required to make a MacOSX application using WxHaskell, for GHC 7.0.3, dd 20110523

Prerequisites

• Install GHC 7.0.3.
• Install brew, a package manager for MacOSX.

wx

• Install wx, using brew. Make sure no previous wx installation hangs around, in particular not in /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib as suggested by the brew installation.

$ brew install wxmac

wxHaskell

• Install wxHaskell.

$ cabal install wx

• Install cabal support for creating MacOSX application bundles.

$ cabal install cabal-macosx

Building a hello world app

• Get the wx hello world example from the cabal-macosx archive.
• In order to run on MacOSX the following additional tweaks have to be made:
  • Follow these instructions to use enableGUI, which boils down to including/importing module EnableGUI in your project, and calling enableGUI before the actual program is started up.
  • The thus imported module EnableGUI requires the use of FFI, so the cabal file for the example needs ghc to use FFI, accomplished by (e.g.) the following line in the cabal file:

  ghc-options: -fwarn-tabs -threaded -Wall -ffi

-- AtzeDijkstra - 23 May 2011