[Haskell-cafe] Announcing GHC iOS

[Karel Gardas]

On 09/23/13 09:53 PM, Dominick Samperi wrote:
> Apple has kept their 64-bit plans secret until recently, but now they
> want as many apps as possible to migrate to 64-bit. That may mean a big
> push for 64-bit support in LLVM, which can be built upon by GHC...

It's not so easy.

1) ARMv8 is already supported in LLVM by work done by ARM folks for some 
time.

2) Apple's own private ARMv8 support will be merged with current LLVM 
ARMv8 support in the not so near future. See 
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2013-September/065480.html

3) although GHC on ARM is using LLVM as its backend, you still need to 
write some general support code for the architecture itself. See for 
example Platform.hs, StgCRun.c, MachRegs.h and some optimization bits 
also in LLVM backend -- at minimum.

Karel

>
> On Sep 23, 2013 1:06 PM, "Karel Gardas" <karel.gardas at centrum.cz
> <mailto:karel.gardas at centrum.cz>> wrote:
>
>     On 09/23/13 06:52 PM, Dominick Samperi wrote:
>
>         Also, the iPhone 5S is the first with 64-bit support, and for best
>         performance all apps should be 64-bit (because then no 32-bit
>         libs need
>         to be loaded, and there are more general purpose and floating point
>         registers in 64-bit mode). Are there any roadblocks preventing the
>         creation of 64-bit GHC/iOS7 apps?
>
>
>     Yes, it is "just" one: GHC's ARMv8 support is completely missing.
>
>     Cheers,
>     Karel
>