Is there a quick-starting Haskell interpreter suitable for scripting?

Question

Does anyone know of a quick-starting Haskell interpreter that would be suitable for use in writing shell scripts? Running \'hello world\' using Hugs took 400ms on my old laptop

Answer 1

You have two parts to this question:

• you care about performance
• you want scripting

If you care about performance, the only serious option is GHC, which is very very fast: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all

If you want something light for Unix scripting, I'd use GHCi. It is about 30x faster than Hugs, but also supports all the libraries on hackage.

So install GHC now (and get GHCi for free).