end of an era, #Hugs98 #HaskellHugs #Haskell has been removed from #Debian

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1121581

Hugs98 is a Haskell interpreter implemented in C, historically important, with different (maybe better) error messages to GHC. Sadly most of the Haskell library ecosystem is GHC-only.

Some forks of upstream (last release 2006) are still active:

https://github.com/cjacker/Hugs 2019 improvements based on original darcs repo with full history; lots of bundled packages and a more recent base package version

https://github.com/claudeha/Hugs my 2024 fork of cjacker's improvements with some bugfixes and a branch with OverloadedStrings support

https://github.com/augustss/hugs98-plus-Sep2006
updated 2025 based on 2006 tarball (no history), primarily exists to bootstrap MicroHs

https://github.com/augustss/Hugs probably ignore this one, 2006 tarball again

probably more that I have missed

Before starting the big work of porting my experimental #LiveCoding #uzulang #godwit 's #parser from #Alex and #Happy to #Parsec, I finally managed to get a snapshot working in #Termux on my phone by making a tarball including the generated #Haskell files on a machine where Alex and Happy were available and transferring it over network.

This isn't ideal as I can't edit the parser on my phone (no Alex/Happy there; at least not recent enough versions, old ones got via cjacker's Hugs 2019 improvement), so I still want to switch to Parsec which is not so horribly #GHC -only (Parsec has a version that works with #MicroHs and probably #Hugs #HaskellHugs too).

I put the snapshot at
https://mathr.co.uk/web/godwit.html#Download and meanwhile updated the bootstrap script as patching MicroHs isn't necessary any more.

switched from #Android app #UserLAnd to #Termux due to the promise of working sound via #portaudio , and also being generally much less outdated.

need to add a portaudio backend to clive (my thing for #LiveCoding #audio #dsp in the #C programming language) to be able to test it.

had hoped to test with #godwit (my #uzulang in progress) and classic Dirt sampler (which built in Termux with minor fixes), but compiling godwit depends on the #haskell programs alex and happy for generating the parser, and it seems Termux repos don't have them. nor is there darcs (also implemented in Haskell), which I'd need to get #HaskellHugs Hugs 2019 improvement (inc happy) working.

getting happy and alex working with #MicroHs is also far from trivial, even old versions depend on MagicHash and other ghc-isms.