How To Install ghc on CentOS 8

ghc is Glasgow Haskell Compiler

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install ghc on CentOS 8.

What is ghc

GHC is a state-of-the-art, open source, compiler and interactive environment for the functional language Haskell. Highlights - GHC supports the entire Haskell 2010 language plus a wide variety of extensions. - GHC has particularly good support for concurrency and parallelism, including support for Software Transactional Memory (STM). - GHC generates fast code, particularly for concurrent programs. Take a look at GHC’s performance on The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. - GHC works on several platforms including Windows, Mac, Linux, most varieties of Unix, and several different processor architectures. - GHC has extensive optimisation capabilities, including inter-module optimisation. - GHC compiles Haskell code either directly to native code or using LLVM as a back-end. GHC can also generate C code as an intermediate target for porting to new platforms. The interactive environment compiles Haskell to bytecode, and supports execution of mixed bytecode/compiled programs. - Profiling is supported, both by time/allocation and various kinds of heap profiling. - GHC comes with several libraries, and thousands more are available on Hackage.

We can use yum or dnf to install ghc on CentOS 8. In this tutorial we discuss both methods but you only need to choose one of method to install ghc.

Install ghc on CentOS 8 Using dnf

Update yum database with dnf using the following command.

sudo dnf makecache --refresh

The output should look something like this:

CentOS Linux 8 - AppStream                                       43 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - BaseOS                                          65 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - ContinuousRelease                               43 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Extras                                          23 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - FastTrack                                       40 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - HighAvailability                                36 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Plus                                            24 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - PowerTools                                      50 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Modular 8 - x86_64           13 kB/s | 9.2 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64                   24 kB/s | 8.5 kB     00:00    
Metadata cache created.

After updating yum database, We can install ghc using dnf by running the following command:

sudo dnf -y install ghc

Install ghc on CentOS 8 Using yum

Update yum database with yum using the following command.

sudo yum makecache --refresh

The output should look something like this:

CentOS Linux 8 - AppStream                                       43 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - BaseOS                                          65 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - ContinuousRelease                               43 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Extras                                          23 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - FastTrack                                       40 kB/s | 3.0 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - HighAvailability                                36 kB/s | 3.9 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - Plus                                            24 kB/s | 1.5 kB     00:00    
CentOS Linux 8 - PowerTools                                      50 kB/s | 4.3 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux Modular 8 - x86_64           13 kB/s | 9.2 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 8 - x86_64                   24 kB/s | 8.5 kB     00:00    
Metadata cache created.

After updating yum database, We can install ghc using yum by running the following command:

sudo yum -y install ghc

How To Uninstall ghc on CentOS 8

To uninstall only the ghc package we can use the following command:

sudo dnf remove ghc

ghc Package Contents on CentOS 8

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install ghc on CentOS 8 using yum and dnf.