I need a way to run Haskell code without any install on a Mac

Question

I enjoy developing in Haskell, but am presently confronted with a challenge. At my place of education, I don't have administrative rights on my account. I want to debug/test while there. I need a way to run Haskell code without installing haskell-platform or ghci or anything else requiring of an administrative level of privilege. For instance, a web site which will run haskell code (abeit limited to not include file access of course) or a java utility (or standalone .app, though java is preferred due to the nature of the "parental controls"), or something else I haven't thought of. Source or compiled Java, Flash, and source code in Ruby or Python are preferred to native code. This is on Mac OS X 10.6, for reference.

Answer 1

You just need to install homebrew, which you can do without root rights if you do so in your home directory. You can then brew install cabal-install which will automatically install cabal and ghc, or brew install stack to install stack.

Answer 2

You can install GHC without admin privileges, but you'll have to build from source. Check out the Building on MacOS X for more details.

Essentially, like any other open-source project, you can compile code and install it, generally, anywhere on your filesystem like into a folder in your home folder (I often use the ~/.local folder for that purpose).

As the linked page mentions, you can also use MacPorts and install it to any place you can write to. Once MacPorts is installed you can install GHC.

EDIT

As pointed out by Carl in the comments below, you don't need to build from source. Just grab the binary tarball from http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_7_4_1#binaries.

Answer 3

In addition to all the other ideas, several companies will rent you virtual (cloud) linux servers for a few cents an hour. You have root on those and can install whatever you want, then freeze the image until you need it again.

Normally this might not be advantageous over a local solution if you can make one work, but a possible extra benefit would be that your work can stay on a single "computer" which you could access while sitting in front of any variety of modern PC that might be available to you on a given day.

Answer 4

An alternative not only for Haskell is http://ideone.com/

Answer 5

For the website option, TryHaskell will hardly cut it, it's way to limited.

codepad, OTOH, is more liberal, and should be of more use.

But honestly the bindist option is the best one, clearly!

Answer 6

If you truly can't install anything, then there's

http://tryhaskell.org/ -- like GHCi, but you can't load modules, which means not only that you can't use many standard functions (say, the functions in Data.List), but also that you can't use certain language features (like user-defined algebraic data types).

I also remember a hpaste-style site which executes its code -- and allows you to have private pastes -- but I can't remember it at the moment. Edit: I was thinking of http://codepad.org/ -- thanks @Mog

Answer 7

Try http://hiji.tinyrocket.se/ It is a haskell interpreter written using javascript.

http://ghc.io/ GHC.IO is a version of the Haskell interactive interpreter, ghci, that runs online in a web browser.

Answer 8

There is a web-based interpreter for Haskell at http://tryhaskell.org/. However, it may not provide enough functionality for your requirements.