If I am using Haskell Platform (2013.2.0.0) with GHC (7.6.3) is it okay to install Xcode 5?

Question

I currently have Xcode 4.6.3 installed. Today the App Store told me that Xcode 5 is available.

Should I upgrade, or will the upgrade break GHC 7.6.3?

I am looking at ghc trac #8197 and ghc trac #8148, and they seem to suggest that there will be problems. Is that correct?

Answer 1

No it is not.

Upgrading to Xcode 5 will break a whole mess of things. (A common one is Cabal installs)

GHC 7.6.x does not now how to use clang for a preprocessing step and it will break.

Do not upgrade to Xcode 5 until GHC 7.8 is released.

I did this before I started learning haskell and it was not a fun experience trying to figure out what went wrong when I tried to download cabal packages and ghc generated a 4000 line error code.

See: http://haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2013-September/108902.html

If anyone who has already downloaded Xcode 5 stumbles upon this after everything breaks, the way to fix your bug is:

1. Download the Xcode 4.6.x command line tools from the apple developer website.
2. Install
3. Write some killer Haskell