GHC Weekly News - 2015/01/19

Austin Seipp austin at well-typed.com
Mon Jan 19 21:37:56 UTC 2015


Hi *,

It's time for some more GHC news! The GHC 7.10 release is closing in,
which has been the primary place we're focusing our attention. In
particular, we're hoping RC2 will be Real Soon Now.

Some notes from the past GHC HQ meetings this week:

  - GHC 7.10 is still rolling along smoothly, and it's expected that
RC2 will be cut this Friday, January 23rd. Austin sent out an email
about this to `ghc-devs`, so we can hopefully get all the necessary
fixes in.

  - Our status page for GHC 7.10 lists all the current bullet points
and tickets we hope to address:
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.1

  - Currently, GHC HQ isn't planning on focusing many cycles on any
GHC 7.10 tickets that aren't '''highest priority'''. We're otherwise
going to fix things as we see fit, at our leisure - but a highest
priority bug is a showstopper for us. This means if you have something
you consider a showstopper for the next release, you should bump the
priority on the ticket and yell at us!

  - We otherwise think everything looks pretty smooth for 7.10.1 RC2 -
our libraries are updated, and most of the currently queued patches
(with a few minor exceptions) are done and merged.

Some notes from the mailing list include:

  - Austin announced the GHC 7.10.1 RC2 cutoff, which will be on
'''Friday the 23rd'''.
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-January/008026.html

  - Austin has alerted everyone that soon, Phabricator will run all
builds with `./validate --slow`, which will increase the time taken
for most builds, but will catch a wider array of bugs in commits and
submitted patches - there are many cases the default `./validate`
script still doesn't catch.
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-January/008030.html

  - Johan Tibell asked about some clarifications for the `HsBang`
datatype inside GHC. In response, Simon came back with some
clarifications, comments, and refactorings, which greatly helped
Johan. ttps://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-January/007905.html

  - Jens Petersen announced a Fedora Copr repo for GHC 7.8.4:
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-January/007978.html

  - Richard Eisenberg had a question about the vectoriser: can we
disable it? DPH seems to have stagnated a bit recently, bringing into
question the necessity of keeping it on. There hasn't been anything
done yet, but it looks like the build will get lighter, with a few
more modules soon:
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-January/007986.html

  - Ben Gamari has an interesting email about trying to optimize
`bytestring`, but he hit a snag with small literals being floated out
causing very poor assembly results. Hopefully Simon (or anyone!) can
follow up soon with some help:
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-January/007997.html

  - Konrad Gądek asks: why does it seem the GHC API is slower at
calling native code than a compiled executable is? Konrad asks as this
issue of performance is particularly important for their work.
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-January/007990.html

  - Jan Stolarek has a simple question: what English spelling do we
aim for in GHC? It seems that while GHC supports an assortment of
British and American english syntactic literals (e.g. `SPECIALIZE` and
`SPECIALISE`), the compiler sports an assortment of British/American
identifiers on its own!
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-January/007999.html

  - Luis Gabriel has a question about modifying the compiler's
profiling output, particularly adding a new CCS (Cost Centre
Structure) field. He's hit a bug it seems, and is looking for help
with his patch.
https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-January/008015.html

Closed tickets the past few weeks include: #9966, #9904, #9969, #9972,
#9934, #9967, #9875, #9900, #9973, #9890, #5821, #9984, #9997, #9998,
#9971, #10000,  #10002, #9243, #9889, #9384, #8624, #9922, #9878,
#9999, #9957, #7298, and #9836.

-- 
Regards,

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


More information about the ghc-devs mailing list