Platforms
The following table describes to what extent GHC currently supports various platforms. To find out who is responsible for each platform, see GHC Code Owners.
For information about what distributions GHC is part of, see the distribution packages page.
Please be aware that this page is highly unmaintained and may list platforms as tier 2 that didn't see any updates for years.
Tier 1 platforms
Tier 1 platforms are our top priority. We only release GHC when they all work. Although there are not many Tier 1 platforms, they cover a very large fraction of our users.
Criteria for Tier 1 platforms:
- An active buildbot client, capable of doing full builds and uploading distributions.
- An active sponsor, willing to investigate and fix platform-specific bugs, and to work with us during the release process
| **Architecture** | **OS** | **Build name** | **Reg'd** | **GHCi** | **NCG** | **f.i.** | **Dyn libs** | **Sponsor** | **WikiPage** |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| x86 | Windows (MinGW) | i386-unknown-mingw32 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes(\*W) | GHC HQ | WindowsGhc |
| x86 | Linux | i386-unknown-{linux,gnu} | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | GHC HQ | |
| x86-64 | Linux | x86_64-unknown-linux | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | GHC HQ | |
| x86 | MacOS X | i386-apple-darwin | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | needed | Attic/X86OSXGhc |
| x86-64 | MacOS X | x86_64-apple-darwin | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | needed | |
| x86 | FreeBSD | i386-portbld-freebsd | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Gabor Pali | FreeBSDGhc |
| x86-64 | FreeBSD | amd64-portbld-freebsd | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Gabor Pali | FreeBSDGhc |
*W Win32 DLL support bitrotten
Tier 2 platforms
Tier 2 platforms work (to varying degrees), but we rely on community support for developing, testing, and building distributions. We may release GHC with some Tier 2 platforms not working.
Platform-specific bugs on Tier 2 platforms are marked "low priority" (unless there's a strong reason not to do so), not because they are unimportant to the users of that platform, but to express the fact that they aren't going to hold up the release.
We'd like to promote as many Tier 2 platforms as possible to Tier 1, as soon as they meet the Tier 1 criteria.
| **Architecture** | **OS** | **Build name** | **Reg'd** | **GHCi** | **NCG** | **f.i.** | **Dyn libs** | **WikiPage** |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| x86 | OpenBSD | i386-unknown-openbsd | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | |
| x86 | Solaris | i386-unknown-solaris2 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes (\*S4) | |
| x86-64 | OpenBSD | amd64-unknown-openbsd | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | |
| PowerPC | Linux | powerpc-unknown-linux | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | |
| PowerPC | MacOS X | powerpc-apple-darwin | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| PowerPC64 | Linux | powerpc64-unknown-linux | No | No | No | Yes | No | |
| Sparc | Solaris | sparc-sun-solaris2 | No (\*S3) | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Building/Solaris |
| Sparc | Linux | sparc-unknown-linux | Yes(\*S2) | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | |
| IA-64 | Linux | ia64-unknown-linux | No | No | No | No | No | Building/IA64Linux |
| Alpha | Linux | alpha-unknown-linux | No | No | No | Yes | No | |
| HPPA | Linux | hppa-unknown-linux | No | No | No | No | No | |
| S/390 | Linux | s390-ibm-linux | No | No | No | No | No | |
| m68k | Linux | m68k-unknown-linux | No | No | No | No | No | |
| mips | Linux | mips-unknown-linux | No | No | No | No | No | |
| mipsel | Linux | mipsel-unknown-linux | No | No | No | No | No | |
| ARM | Linux | arm-unknown-linux | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | |
| ARM | Debian armel | arm-linux-gnueabi | Yes | No | No | No | No | Building/ARMLinuxGnuEABI |
| ARM | iOS | arm-apple-darwin10 | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | Building/CrossCompiling/iOS |
| PowerPC | AIX | powerpc-ibm-aix | No | No | No | ? | No | Building/AIX |
*S1 Goetz Isenmann reports that GHCi is currently unable to load compiled code that refers to errno. *S2 but see #591 *S3 registerised in the past up to GHC 7.0.4 release, then unregisterised due to removal of registerised -fvia-C way (mangler) *S4 shared libraries are supported on Solaris 11 version 11/11 and higher
In most cases, binaries for the tier 2 platforms can be downloaded from the Distribution Packages page, e.g. you can get binaries for most of the Linux platforms from Debian. In some cases, for example the Solaris platforms, you'll need to go to the download page of a particular release to get a bindist.
Tier 3 platforms
Tier 3 platforms worked in the past, but probably do not work now.
| **Architecture** | **OS** | **Build name** | **Reg'd** | **GHCi** | **NCG** | **f.i.** | **Dyn libs** | **WikiPage** |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mips64 | Irix | mips-unknown-linux | No | No | No | No | No | |
| x86 | Windows (Cygwin) | i386-unknown-cygwin32 | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No(\*2) | |
| Alpha | Dec OSF | alpha-dec-osf3 | No | No | No | Yes | No | |
| ARM | Maemo (Linux) | arm-unknown-linux-gnu | Yes | No | No | No | No | ArmLinuxGhc |
| x86 | NetBSD | i386-unknown-netbsd | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | |
| x86 | DragonFlyBSD | i386-unknown-dflybsd | Yes | No(\*S1) | Yes | Yes | No | |
| x86-64 | NetBSD | amd64-unknown-netbsd | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Definitions
Reg'd (Registerised)
A catch-all term for a number of optimisations, which collectively require the mangler (a Perl script that post-processes the assembly output from gcc). Unregisterised builds require only a working C compiler and are hence far more portable. The registerised optimisations include: direct tail calls (as opposed to using the "mini-interpreter"), info-tables adjacent to entry code, and virtual machine registers mapped to real machine registers.
GHCi
The interactive environment, including dynamic linking of object code and dynamic generation of FFI calls.
NCG
Native code generator: GHC can generate assembly code directly for this platform, bypassing gcc.
f.i. wrapper
Support for
foreign import "wrapper"(ghc/rts/Adjustor.c).
Dynamic libraries
Support for generating dynamically-linked sharable libraries from Haskell code.