Proposal: Improving the LLVM backend by packaging it

[Sophie Taylor]

If this does happen, it'd probably make sense to use this as a chance to
refactor out the LLVM bits and use the llvm-general package. llvm-general
seems to only depend on base libraries (apart from parsec, which seems to
only be used for parsing data layout formats; it could probably be disabled
with a compiler flag if we construct the data layout structures directly;
see
https://github.com/bscarlet/llvm-general/blob/5f266db5ad8015f7d79374684b083ffdeed3c245/llvm-general-pure/src/LLVM/General/DataLayout.hs).
It seems a more principled way than what is currently implemented, and work
done to improve that library via ghc would also help every other user of
the library, and visa versa.

On 27 October 2014 19:25, Sergei Trofimovich <slyich at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Oct 2014 18:52:53 -0500
> Austin Seipp <austin at well-typed.com> wrote:
>
> > I won't repeat what's on the wiki page too much, but the TL;DR version
> > is: we should start packaging a version of LLVM, and shipping it with
> > e.g. binary distributions of GHC. It's just a lot better for everyone.
> >
> > I know we're normally fairly hesitant about things like this (shipping
> > external dependencies), but I think it's the only sane thing to do
> > here, and the situation is fairly unique in that it's not actually
> > very complicated to implement or support, I think.
>
> That makes a lot of sense! Gentoo allows user
> upgrade llvm and ghc independently, which makes
> syncing harder. Thus Gentoo does not care much
> about llvm support in ghc.
>
> --
>
>   Sergei
>
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