[wxhaskell-users] wxHaskell on Windows (or wxPack rocks!)

[Eric Y. K. <eri...@gm...>]

Hi everybody,

I've had some difficulty installing wxHaskell on Windows 7, but I
eventually got there, so I thought I should report (and edit the wiki).

In a nutshell: the secret is to use wxPack (precompiled wxWidgets
including MinGW Unicode version) [1] and avoid trying to build wxWidgets
yourself.

Credit goes to SkyTreeBird23 for suggesting wxPack in his guide
[2].  (Say hello if you're reading this mailing list!)

This is not a complete how-to.  I'll edit the wiki when I have a spare
moment.  But I hope this list of pitfalls helps somebody in the
meantime.

My setup
--------------------------------------------------
- VM running in Parallels 6 allocated 1 GiB of RAM
- Windows 7 Professional
- WxPack 2.8.12.01
- wxcore 0.12.1.7  
- wx-config.exe

Things I have tried
- Mingw (32 bit) installer version 20110530
  (have also tried 20110316)
- TDM GCC 4.5.2

Documentation
--------------------------------------------------
1. wxHaskell on Haskell wiki (Building)
   http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/WxHaskell/Building

2. wxWidgets MingW page
   http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Installing_WxWin_MinGW

Issues I've run into
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1. ld.exe: out of memory allocating N bytes
  
   Solution: use the TDM version of GCC, not the MinGW.  See wxWidgets
   wiki page above; it might be some sort of MinGW bug.

2. ld returned 5 exit status

   Solution: clean your source tree (after hitting #1).  Just typing
   mingw32-make -f makefile.gcc clean was apparently not enough, so
   I ended up unzipping a fresh one

3. wxHaskell builds fine, but when running any GUI app:
   The procedure entry point __gxx_personality_v0 could not be
   located in the dynamic link library libstdc++-6.dll

   Solution: (stumped - I think this has may have something to do with
   building Haskell stuff with the HP-built-in GCC and wxWidgets with
   the TDM GCC, but I don't really understand enough about libraries
   to say)
   
   At this point, I stumbled on SkyTreeBird's guide who informed me
   of the existence of

4. wxWidgets hasn't been found installed at 'C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12'

   The wxPack installer unfortunately does not include a dash
   by default in the path it offers you.  I think it wants to
   put wxWidgets in something like 'C:\Source Code\wxWidgets2.8'
   I got rid of the 'Source Code', but did not notice the missing
   hyphen.

5. (Hello world) The program can't start because wxmsw28u_gcc.dll
   is missing from your computer

   Solution: make sure C:\wxWidgets-2.8.12\lib\gcc_dll (substitute
   your wxWidgets path accordingly) is in your PATH
   
[1] http://wxpack.sourceforge.net/ 
[2] http://www.scribd.com/doc/38034374/20100923-WxHaskell-Setup

-- 
Eric Kow <http://erickow.com>