The libraries are divided into several packages. The available packages are:

Cabal

The Haskell Cabal is the Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries. It is a framework which defines a common interface for authors to more easily build their applications in a portable way. The Haskell Cabal is meant to be a part of a larger infrastructure for distributing, organizing, and cataloging Haskell Libraries and Tools. For more information, please see: http://www.haskell.org/cabal/.

GLUT

The GLUT package contains a Haskell binding for the OpenGL Utility Toolkit, a window system independent toolkit for writing OpenGL programs. For more information about the C library on which this binding is based, please see: http://www.opengl.org/resources/libraries/glut/.

HGL

A simple graphics library, designed to give the programmer access to most interesting parts of the Win32 Graphics Device Interface and X11 library without exposing the programmer to the pain and anguish usually associated with using these interfaces. Note: the Win32 part is not currently operational.

The library also includes a module Graphics.SOE providing the interface used in The Haskell School of Expression, by Paul Hudak, cf http://www.haskell.org/soe/.

HUnit

HUnit is a unit testing framework for Haskell, inspired by the JUnit tool for Java, see: http://www.junit.org.

OpenGL

The OpenGL package contains a Haskell binding for the OpenGL graphics system (GL, version 2.1) and its accompanying utility library (GLU, version 1.3). OpenGL is the industry's most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API), incorporating a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. For more information about OpenGL, please see: http://www.opengl.org/.

QuickCheck

A library for testing Haskell programs automatically. The programmer provides a specification of the program, in the form of properties which functions should satisfy, and QuickCheck then tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases. Specifications are expressed in Haskell, using combinators defined in the QuickCheck library. QuickCheck provides combinators to define properties, observe the distribution of test data, and define test data generators. For more information, please see: http://www.math.chalmers.se/~rjmh/QuickCheck/.

Win32

A Haskell binding to the Win32 API.

X11

A Haskell binding to the X11 library.

The binding is a direct translation of C binding; for documentation of these calls, refer to The Xlib Programming Manual, available online at http://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/.

base

This package contains the Prelude and its support libraries, and a large collection of useful libraries ranging from data structures to parsing combinators and debugging utilities.

cgi

A library for writing CGI programs.

fgl

Martin Erwig's Functional Graph Library.

filepath

Library for manipulating FilePath's in a cross platform way.

haskell-src

Facilities for manipulating Haskell source code: an abstract syntax, lexer, parser and pretty-printer.

html

An Html combinator library.

mtl

A monad transformer library, inspired by the paper Functional Programming with Overloading and Higher-Order Polymorphism, Mark P Jones (http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~mpj/) Advanced School of Functional Programming, 1995.

network

Networking-related facilities.

parsec

A monadic parser combinator library, written by Daan Leijen. Parsec is designed from scratch as an industrial-strength parser library. It is simple, safe, well documented, has extensive libraries and good error messages, and is also fast. More documentation can be found on: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~daan/parsec.html

readline

An interface to the GNU readline library. More information on readline can be found at http://www.gnu.org/directory/readline.html.

regex-base

Interfaces for regular expressions

regex-compat

Compatibility for Text.Regex

regex-posix

POSIX regular expressions

stm

Software Transactional Memory: a modular composable concurrency abstraction.

template-haskell

Facilities for manipulating Haskell source code using Template Haskell.

time

Clock and calendar time.

unix

POSIX functionality.

xhtml

An XHtml combinator library.

Implementation-specific notes:

GHC/GHCi

Most of the time, all the packages are available without the need to use any additional command-line options. The only time when this is not the case is when linking a program on the command line, without using the --make option: in this case you must list all the packages to link to by adding the -package P flag (where P is the package name) to the command line for each package. See the User's Guide (../users_guide/index.html) for more details.

Hugs

Hugs provides almost all of the modules in the above packages, with exceptions listed on the Hugs 98 libraries status page (http://cvs.haskell.org/Hugs/pages/libstatus.html). All those modules are always available.

Nhc98

Nhc98 provides many of the modules in the above packages (see the Nhc98 libraries page (http://www.haskell.org/nhc98/libraries.html) for a more details). The modules of the haskell98 package are available without the need to use any additional compile-time options. To use modules from some other package P with Nhc98, add the compile-time option -package P.