GHC Weekly News - 2015/04/14

Tue Apr 14 19:07:57 UTC 2015

> == Call for help: DocBook to AsciiDoc ==
>
> So, we're asking the public: Is anyone willing to step up and help
here? For example, it may be possible to get a long ways with just
`pandoc`, but we need someone to finish it - and in return, we'll help
along the way!

Do you have anymore information on this? Tickets? Current status? This
is the first I've heard about the proposed conversion, and I follow
ghc-devs@ pretty closely.

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 10:47 AM, Austin Seipp <austin at well-typed.com> wrote:
> (You can find a copy of this post online at
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog/weekly20150414)
>
> Hi *,
>
> It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - your editor
> apologizes about that. It's actually been a relatively slow few weeks
> here too, and busy-ness outside of GHC has attracted some of my
> attention. Despite that, GHC 7.10.1 was released, a new HP alpha is
> out, and things are moving along smoothly. Now that the release is
> done, things are quitely moving along in `HEAD` - with people
> committing code with reckless abandon, of course.
>
> This week, GHC HQ met up, but it's been very light since the 7.10.1
> release. Currently there isn't anything pushing us to do a 7.10.2
> release at least for a few more weeks it looks like - but see below.
>
>   - We puzzled a bit about the release status of 7.10.2, and thought:
> it's only holding up people who are depending on it. So, who's
> depending on it, and what do they need fixed? See below for more.
>
>   - We also talked a bit about performance - it seems the compiler has
> been getting much slower over time since the 7.8.x release series, and
> it's time to reign it in. Austin will be spending his week
> investigating a bit of this, and the causes.
>
> == 7.10.2 Status ==
>
> So, you may be wondering when the 7.10.2 release is. The trick is it
> happens when you tell us it should happen!
>
> So far, taking a look at milestone:7.10.2, we've fixed about half the
> bugs we currently have marked down to fix. But we're probably going to
> punt some of those - and we're not sure all the ones that are there
> should be.
>
> So this is a call: **If you need something to be fixed during 7.10.2,
> please file a ticket, set the milestone, and alert us**. The sooner
> the better, because it'll inform us as to when we should release.
> Emailing `ghc-devs at haskell.org` is also a sure-fire way to get our
> attention.
>
> And remember: you can always find out the latest about the next
> release at the Status page (in this case, for 7.10.2) -
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.2
>
> == Call for help: DocBook to AsciiDoc ==
>
> The GHC team needs some help. A few months ago, we put out a poll to
> convert our DocBook-based manual to AsciiDoc.
>
> The poll had a mostly lukewarm reception, with the idea that it will
> A) make life easier for people who frequently modify the users guide,
> and B) make life easier for people who add things irregularly, as a
> lower barrier to entry.
>
> It looks like we still **want** to do this - but alas, many of us
> don't have time!
>
> So, we're asking the public: Is anyone willing to step up and help
> here? For example, it may be possible to get a long ways with just
> `pandoc`, but we need someone to finish it - and in return, we'll help
> along the way!
>
> == List chatter ==
>
>   - Austin Seipp announced GHC
>     7.10.1. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008700.html
>
>   - Mark Lentczner announced an alpha Haskell Platform
>     release. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008724.html
>
>   - David Macek announced MSYS2 packages for GHC on Windows, and also
>     asked for some help with continuous windows building - Windows
>     hackers should help out!
> https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008735.html
>
>   - Jan Stolarek reports about increased memory usage with GHC 7.10.1.
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008751.html
>
>   - Thomas Miedema chimed into a thread started by Karel Gardas about
>     better parallelizing the GHC build - and hopefully we can get
>     something good out of
>     it. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008749.html
>
>   - Austin Seipp made a call for help on working on and improving the
>     GHC homepage, and luckily Sergey Bushnyak answered the call and
>     has helped out!
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008762.html
>
>   - Ozgun Ataman kicked off a thread about slower compilation times,
>     with some nasty numbers. It's becoming more clear compiler
>     performance should be a priority for 7.12, and we've let some
>     things slip away from us:
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008766.html
>
>   - A GHC user, Dave, asked the list about some questions with Cross
>     Compilation, as he's attempting to get GHC to work natively inside
>     the Open Embedded build environment. Unfortunately, things haven't
>     been going well so far, and any input from enterprising hackers is
>     appreciated:
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008774.html
>
>   - Dan Aloni has started a discussion about improving GHC's error
>     messages, spurred by a popular blog post he wrote and posted on
>     Reddit about some Happy/GHC improvements he's made. This is a
>     difficult area (error messages in general are hard) to work on, so
>     thanks to Dan for helping!
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008778.html
>
>   - Simon Peyton Jones started a discussion about
>     `GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving` and Safe Haskell, in particular,
>     whatever the current status, our documentation doesn't accurately
>     reflect it! Perhaps someone could help out writing the
>     documentation based on the current status quo?
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008783.html
>
>   - Tamar Christina started a thread about replacing `ghc-split`, an
>     old Perl script inside GHC, but he wanted to know: what do we do
>     about a regex replacement? Mikhail Glushenkov spoke up about a
>     similar decision the LLVM developers used: to use the OpenBSD
>     regex implementation.
> https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008785.html
>
>   - Alan Zimmerman has posted several questions and threads about the
>     parser and the status of API annotations, which he's been
>     furiously working on now that GHC 7.10 is being used on
>     Hackage. Interested onlookers could learn a thing or two!
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008782.html
>     &
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008787.html
>     &
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008794.html
>
>   - Gabor Greif has a question about some seemingly strange behavior
>     regarding the interaction between poly-kinded `data` types and
>     overlapping instances. Richard sez: this behavior is
>     expected. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008804.html
>
> == Noteworthy commits ==
>
>   - Commit de1160be047790afde4ec76de0a81ba3be0c73fa - refactor the
>     story around switch cases (with a code-size improvement)
>
>   - Commit 995e8c1c8692b60c907c7d2ccea179d52ca8e69e - drop old
>     `integer-gmp-0.5` source code.
>
>   - Commit 59f7a7b6091e9c0564f3f370d09398d8c9cd8ad5 - Restore unwind
>     information generation (fixes DWARF generation)
>
>   - Commit 9f0f99fd41ff82cc223d3b682703e508efb564d2 - Fix an old bug
>     in the demand analyzer (with some nice compiler performance
>     boosts).
>
>   - Commit a7524eaed33324e2155c47d4a705bef1d70a2b5b - Support for
>     multiple signature files in scope (Backpack).
>
> == Closed tickets ==
>
> #10222, #10219, #8057, #10226, #10220, #9723, #10230, #10208, #10236,
> #10213, #10231, #10240, #10243, #10237, #10224, #8811, #10197, #10252,
> #9958, #10253, #8248, #10207, #10214, #9964, #10194, #10251, #10188,
> #10257, #10247, #10247, #9160, #10259, #9965, #10265, #10264, #10286,
> #10282, #10290, #10291, #10300, #9929, #8276, #10218, #10148, #10232,
> #10274, #10275, #10195, and #10233.
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
> Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/
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