GHC status report

[Simon Marlow]

On 30/04/2014 01:35, George Colpitts wrote:
> It doesn't have anything about the dynamic linking changes made for 7.8.
> I think it's worth mentioning the improvements we expect to get from
> that. The highlights of the release notes do mention it, so maybe that
> suffices.
>
> In particular, I'm hoping that it is going to fix a lot of problems with
> using foreign libraries such as OpenGL from ghci. I could be wrong about
> that though.

I'd like to understand more about what those problems are.  As a data 
point, at Facebook we're using static linking (I compiled GHC with 
DYNAMIC_GHC_PROGRAMS=NO), we're loading upwards of 50 3rd-party C++ 
libraries and one gigantic shared library consisting of a ton of 
in-house C++ code, together with all our Haskell code into GHCi, and it 
works perfectly.  The key to using the static linker is to not use it 
for C++ code - you want all your external C++ code in shared libraries 
and load those using the system linker.

Dynamic linking has been a huge headache in GHC, and it's not clear that 
it's an overall improvement compared with the static linker.  Now that 
7.8 is out of the way, it's time to have a conversation about whether we 
want to do dynamic linking again for 7.10, or revert to static linking. 
  I think Austin is going to update 
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DynamicGhcPrograms, and then we'll 
see where we stand.

Cheers,
Simon



>
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 6:13 PM, Simon Peyton Jones
> <simonpj at microsoft.com <mailto:simonpj at microsoft.com>> wrote:
>
>     As Austin has told us, there’s a draft of the *GHC Status Report for
>     the HCAR*, here:____
>
>     https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/May14____
>
>     Have we missed out something  you have been working hard on?  Do
>     take a moment to add a bullet in an appropriate place (it’s a
>     wiki).  I’d like to be sure that we are giving credit to all the
>     appropriate people, so please help us fix that too.  GHC is a team
>     effort.____
>
>     Deadline is 1 May I think.____
>
>     Thanks____
>
>     Simon____
>
>     __ __
>
>
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