question about GHC API on GHC plugin

[Mike Izbicki]

I'm pretty sure the `buildDictionary` function doesn't do what I need.
AFAICT, you pass it a `Var` which contains a dictionary, and it tells
you what is in that dictionary.  What I need is a function with type
`Var -> Var` where the first `Var` contains a function, and the output
`Var` is the dictionary.

For example, given the expression:

    log (a1+a2)

In core, this might look like:

    log @ Float $fFloatingFloat (+ @ Float $fNumFloat a1 a2)

I want to mechanically construct the core code above.  When doing so,
each function within a type class has an extra argument, which is the
dictionary for that type class.  `log` no longer takes one parameter;
in core, it takes two.  I'm having trouble figuring out how to get the
appropriate dictionary to pass as the "dictionary parameter" to these
functions.

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:21 PM, Andrew Farmer <afarmer at ittc.ku.edu> wrote:
> HERMIT has some code for building dictionaries for a given predicate
> type (by invoking the typechecker functions that do this):
>
> https://github.com/ku-fpg/hermit/blob/master/src/HERMIT/Dictionary/GHC.hs#L223
>
> The functions to run TcM computations inside CoreM are here:
>
> https://github.com/ku-fpg/hermit/blob/master/src/HERMIT/Monad.hs#L242
> and
> https://github.com/ku-fpg/hermit/blob/master/src/HERMIT/GHC/Typechecker.hs#L47
>
> Perhaps that will help get you started?
>
> I would like to push these interfaces back into the GHC API at some
> point, but just haven't done it yet.
>
> HTH
> Andrew
>
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Mike Izbicki <mike at izbicki.me> wrote:
>> I'm not sure how either of those two functions can help me.  The
>> problem is that given an operator (e.g. `+`), I don't know the name of
>> the dictionary that needs to be passed in as the first argument to the
>> operator.  I could probably hard code these names, but then the plugin
>> wouldn't be able to work with alternative preludes.
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 11:20 PM, Edward Z. Yang <ezyang at mit.edu> wrote:
>>> Hello Mike,
>>>
>>> Give importDecl from LoadIface a try, or maybe tcLookupGlobal if
>>> you're in TcM.
>>>
>>> Edward
>>>
>>> Excerpts from Mike Izbicki's message of 2015-08-07 15:40:30 -0700:
>>>> I'm trying to write a GHC plugin.  The purpose of the plugin is to
>>>> provide Haskell bindings to Herbie. Herbie
>>>> (https://github.com/uwplse/herbie) is a program that takes a
>>>> mathematical statement as input, and gives you a numerically stable
>>>> formula to compute it as output.  The plugin is supposed to automate
>>>> this process for Haskell programs.
>>>>
>>>> I can convert the core expressions into a format for Herbie just fine.
>>>> Where I'm having trouble is converting the output from Herbie back
>>>> into core.  Given a string that represents a numeric operator (e.g.
>>>> "log" or "+"), I can get that converted into a Name that matches the
>>>> Name of the version of that operator in scope at the location.  But in
>>>> order to create an Expr, I need to convert the Name into a Var.  All
>>>> the functions that I can find for this (e.g. mkGlobalVar) also require
>>>> the type of the variable.  But I can't find a way to figure out the
>>>> Type given a Name.  How can I do this?
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