Planning for the 7.12 release

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On 2015-08-28 at 11:48:08 +0200, Ben Gamari wrote:

[...]

> Hmm, interesting. I'm not sure how realistic it is to make this a
> link-time option, however, considering that we may inline bindings from
> whatever integer package we compile against into the user's program.
>
> Herbert, do you have any thoughts on this?

It's quite realistic, because we can do this at the C ABI level, where
inlining is not an issue. We wouldn't switch between various Haskell
packages, but rather between different C libraries, all providing the
same API at the C-ABI level.

This was hinted at in

  https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Design/IntegerGmp2

The first step towards that is finding an alternative bignum library
(maybe 'bsdnt') that can be modified to operate on the same
array-of-limb representation as GMP, and get this working as a GHC
build-time configuration option of the `integer-gmp`-package. Once this
is accomplished, turning this into a `ghc` link-time flag should be
relatively easy.

Cheers,
  hvr