Continuous Integration and Cross Compilation

[William Knop]

Hello all,

I’ve seen quite a few comments on the list and elsewhere lamenting the time it takes to compile and validate ghc. It’s troublesome not only because it’s inconvenient, but, more seriously, people are holding off on sending patches in which stifles development. I would like to propose a solution:

1. Implement proper cross-compilation, such that build and host may be different— e.g. a linux x86_64 machine can build ghc that runs on Windows x86. What sort of work would this entail?

2. Batch cross-compiled builds for all OSs/archs on a continuous integration service (e.g. Travis CI) or cloud service, then package up the binaries with the test suite.

3. Send the package to our buildbots, and run the test suite.

4. (optional) If using a CI service, have the buildbots send results back to the CI. This could be useful if we'd use GitHub for pulls in the future *.

Cheers,
Will


* I realize vanilla GitHub currently has certain annoying limitations, though some of them are pretty easy to solve via the github-services and/or webhooks. I don’t think this conflicts with the desire to use Phabricator, either, so I’ll send details and motivations to that thread.