Linker change in GHC 7.8 leads to widespread issues

[Howard B. Golden]

Hi,

There aren't more complaints because most people haven't tried 7.8 seriously yet. (I didn't notice the problem since I've only been using GHC 7.8 under Windows.) This points out the need for some sort of regular testing of canaries (full systems producing known results) to test the entire toolchain including common libraries (HP, perhaps) and Cabal.

At the risk of antagonizing the developers again, I will point out that there is a bit of disconnect between GHC developers, Cabal developers, library developers and users (application developers). Without slowing the GHC developers' creativity, there is a need to look at the experience of the application developers. FWIW, my sense is that there is too much turbulence for many potential application developers to adopt Haskell as their production platform unless they have significant in-house resources to deal with the rapid changes. (As as thought experiment, how many changes have to be made to Real World Haskell's programs to get them to run?)


Howard



----- Original Message -----
From: Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
To: Miëtek Bak <mietek at bak.io>; Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald at gmail.com>
Cc: "cabal-devel at haskell.org" <cabal-devel at haskell.org>; "ghc-devs at haskell.org" <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 3, 2014 4:03 AM
Subject: Re: Linker change in GHC 7.8 leads to widespread issues

I'm actually rather surprised we got away without doing this up to now. 
  Why haven't there been more complaints?

Cheers,
Simon