problem using Haskell Stack on cygwin - missing library pcre - cygwin

Question

I am running stack Version 2.1.3, x86_64 hpack-0.31.2 on cygwin. A Haskell project that I am trying to build requires the use of regex-pcre-0.94.4 which in turn requires the pcre library. The exact message I get is:
$ stack build
regex-pcre> configure
regex-pcre> Configuring regex-pcre-0.94.4...
regex-pcre> Cabal-simple_Z6RU0evB_2.0.1.0_ghc-8.2.2.exe: Missing dependency
on a foreign library:
regex-pcre> * Missing C library: pcre
regex-pcre> This problem can usually be solved by installing the system package that
provides this library (you may need the "-dev" version). If the library is already
installed but in a non-standard location then you can use the flags
--extra-include-dirs= and --extra-lib-dirs= to specify where it is.
There does not seem to be an easy way of obtaining a relatively recent version of pcre binaries for Windows (the ones at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/pcre.htm are too old for my purposes). There is a video showing how to build the binaries from source but before I go that route, there are some relatively recent precompiled binaries available at https://github.com/dragokas/PCRE but I have no idea what to do with them or where to place them. This is beginning to look like a lot of work that I am wondering if its worth it or I should just drop the idea of doing it in Windows and move to Linux. Any ideas or suggestions?
PS. I also notice that cygwin already has a pcre library (/bin/cygpcre2-16-0.dll). but as this looks like a 16-bit library I assume it won't work, and again I am not sure how to tell stack to use this.

Answer 1

Here I found the answer:
regex-pcre doesn't support Windows, at least the current
regex-pcre.cabal doesn't work well on Windows.
Try regex-pcre-builtin, it's the same as regex-pcre, but with
PCRE sources bundled in. I don't know why the author doesn't merge it
into regex-pcre, but creating a new package for this.
I had to change only name regex-pcre to regex-pcre-builtin (as versioning is the same) in my .cabal file that installs dependencies with stack build. (example: ./your-project-name.cabal)