Proposal: provide cas and barriers symbols even without -threaded

[Ryan Newton]

Short version:

Patch for the barriers here:
    http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8077

Long version:

 I started adding some of these primops to GHC proper (still as
>> out-of-line), but not all of them.  I had gone with the foreign primop
>> route instead...
>>
> Ok, will you make a ticket and attach the patches when you're ready?


Ah, so the feeling is that the feeling is "foreign primops in a hackage
library isn't really ideal and they should eventually come to rest in GHC"?
 I think I'm coming to concur with that.

Honestly, my biggest barrier as a sometimes-almost-GHC-contributor is that
when I haven't touched it in a while, the dance to get GHC validating can
take some doing.  For example, I downloaded fresh copies just now and it
failed on mac OS and RHEL6 but worked on Ubuntu 12.04.  Anyway, I just
added a couple entries to the build troubleshooting
page<http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Troubleshooting>,
and was able to validate with and without this patch (for the barrier
KEEP_INLINES issue):


https://github.com/rrnewton/ghc/commit/5cfb51303192b6722276a7848f265cfcbec56f8d

And I attached it to the ticket here:
    http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8077


Since I'm in a good state now I'll try to also get some validated
out-of-line atomic primops in there soon for Carter to port to inline
primops at his leisure.

On the topic of easy validation, I see it was discussed several years
ago<http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gmaMH1TiUX0J:www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2009-June/017366.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us>
that
a GHC development VM might be useful.  It doesn't look like that happened.
 But isn't it even easier nowadays?  It looks like Amazon lets people
just provide
community VMs <https://www.fpcomplete.com/page/haskell-eval-vm> for others
to use.  If I validate on there maybe I can find the share/publish button...

Best,
  -Ryan

P.S. For general Haskell development (not GHC development) it looks like FP
Complete provides a VM:
   https://www.fpcomplete.com/page/haskell-eval-vm
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