We're happy to announce the availability of MinGHC for GHC 7.10. MinGHC is a minimal GHC installer for Windows, consisting of:

• GHC itself

• cabal-install

• MSYS, which is necessary for building some packages such as network

MinGHC came out of some conversation Neil Mitchell and I had at

ICFP last year about pain on the Windows platform, and consists of

a lot of good code by Neil, and some hacky attempts by me at

understanding Windows installer processes. While this project

predates the Commercial Haskell SIG by a few months, it's essentially the first project undertaken by the group.

While MinGHC is relatively young, it's also a minimalistic

product, simply repackaging and serving upstream components

unmodified. Additionally, it has become the recommended installer

by quite a

few sites, and

therefore has already received significant testing. Also, due to

its minimal nature, it's easy to pop out new releases of MinGHC.

For example, this current release was made less than two hours

after GHC itself was released!

While this project is stable, additional testers and contributors are certainly welcome. Please check out the Github project page for more information.