GHC Weekly News - 2014/11/18

[Mikolaj Konarski]

Austin got caught in a rescue operation (which seems to have
succeeded, given that haskell.org is up again), so I'm posting
his writeup for the GHC Weekly News, straight from the blog post:

https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog/weekly20141118

-----------


Hello *,

Once more we have the GHC Weekly news! This one is a bit late due to
Austin being in limbo unexpectedly for a few days last week. (The next
one will of course come again on Friday to keep things straight.)

With that out of the way, let's see what exactly is going on:

The STABLE freeze is happening at the end of this week! That means if
you have something you want to get in, try to get people aware of it!
Austin (yours truly) has a backed up review queue it would seem, but
hopes to clear a bunch of it out before then.

Simon and Gergo started a whole bunch of discussion about type
signatures for pattern synonyms. There is a surprising amount of
content to talk about here for something that might seem simple:
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-November/007066.html

Herbert Valerio Riedel has finally landed integer-gmp2, AKA Phab:D86,
which implements a complete overhaul of the integer-gmp library. This
library will be switched on by default in GHC 7.10.1, which means the
integer-gmp library version will have a super-major bump (version
1.0.0.0). This is the beginning of a longer-term vision for more
flexible Integer support in GHC, as described by Herbert on the design
page: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Design/IntegerGmp2 This
implementation also fixes a long standing pain point where GHC would
hook GMP allocations to exist on the GHC heap. Now GMP is just called
to like any FFI library.

Jan Stolarek made a heads up to help out GHC newcomers: if you see a
ticket that should be easy, please tag it with the newcomer keyword!
This will let us have a live search of bugs that new developers can
take over. (Incidentally, Joachim mentions this is the same thing
Debian is doing in their bug tracker):
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-November/007313.html

Merijn Verstraaten has put forward a proposal for more flexible
literate style Haskell file extensions. There doesn't seem to be any
major opposition, just some questions about the actual specification
and some other ramifications:
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-November/007319.html

Facundo Domínguez posed a question about CAFs in the GC, which Jost
Berthold was fairly quick to reply to:
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-November/007353.html

Adam Gundry, Eric Seidel, and Iavor Diatchki have grouped together to
get a new, unexpected feature into 7.10: type checking plugins. Now,
GHC will be able to load a regular Haskell package as a plugin during
the compilation process. Iavor has a work-in-progress plugin that
solves constraints for type-level natural numbers using a SMT solver.
The code review from everyone was published in Phab:D489.

Austin opened up a discussion about the future of the Haskell98 and
Haskell2010 packages, and the unfortunate conclusion is it looks like
we're going to drop them for 7.10. Austin has some rationale, and
there was some followup in the mailing list thread too:
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-November/007357.html

Closed tickets this week include: #9785, #9053, #9513, #9073, #9077,
#9683, #9662, #9646, #9787, #8672, #9791, #9781, #9621, #9594, #9066,
#9527, #8100, #9064, #9204, #9788, #9794, #9608, #9442, #9428, #9763,
#9664, #8750, #9796, #9341, #9330, #9323, #9322, #9749, #7381, #8701,
#9286, #9802, #9800, #9302, #9174, #9171, #9141, #9100, #9134, #8798,
#8756, #8716, #8688, #8680, #8664, #8647, #9804, #8620, #9801, #8559,
#8559, #8545, #8528, #8544, #8558


--
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/