The Haskell Platform is live! Here’s the announce:

The Platform Infrastructure Team is pleased to announce the first 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 culled 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.

You can read about the original vision for the platform in the position paper “Haskell: Batteries included“.

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.

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.

The Haskell Platform would not have been possible without the hard work of the Cabal development team, the Hackage developers and maintainers, the individual compiler, tool and library authors who contributed to the suite, and the distro maintainers who build and distribute the Haskell Platform.

Now on to the task of portably, scalably and reliably adding new libraries and tools to the suite.