[C2hs] precompiled headers with c2hs (again)

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Sorry for being quite, recently - too much other stuff going on...

On Tue, 2004-12-14 at 03:18 +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> All,
> 
> Just to let people know, we've progressed somewhat on the precompiled
> headers front. Outwardly, the patch is much like Axel described
> previously. Internally, we rewrote the serialisation using the Binary
> module from GHC. This allowed us to use shared strings which reduces the
> file size considerably (~20Mb to ~9Mb). It still uses a lazy reading
> scheme so while producing the *.precomp file is still rather slow but
> reading it is really quick.
> 
> For some reason (as yet undiscovered) the serialisation is very slow and
> memory hungry. On my machine it takes 16 seconds to parse all of gtk/gtk
> but 45 seconds to serialise all that to disk.

My only *guess* would be that to serialise, you force some/all of the
semantic analysis of the C AST that usually only occurs lazily for those
parts of the header that are needed for the binding of the currently
compiled .chs file.  It depends on what information exactly you
serialise.  (After all, when I wrote the module CTrav and those it
depends on, I did that under the assumption that in case of a large pre-
processed header file only a small fraction of the declarations will be
relevant for the current run of c2hs.  In other words, I optimised for
the individual analysis functions to be reasonable fast and not for the
analysis of a *complete* header file to be fast.)

> Our current branch is hosted in the gtk2hs cvs:
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/gtk2hs/gtk2hs/tools/c2hs/
> 
> It is based on c2hs 0.13.4. There are one or two interesting patches in
> addition to the precompiled headers patch:
> 
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/gtk2hs/gtk2hs/tools/c2hs/gen/GenBind.hs?r1=1.1&r2=1.2
> This one makes c2hs chase typedef'ed types so that C function prototypes
> that use typedef'ed types get propper Haskell types rather than Ptr ().
> 
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/gtk2hs/gtk2hs/tools/c2hs/chs/CHS.hs?r1=1.1&r2=1.2
> This one makes c2hs understand hierarchical module names.

Sounds cool.

Cheers,
Manuel