[ANNOUNCE] GHC 7.10.3 release candidate 1

[Ben Gamari]

Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu> writes:

> On Nov 4, 2015, at 11:12 AM, Peter Trommler <Peter.Trommler at th-nuernberg.de> wrote:
>
>> It looks like a bug to me.
>
> I'm taking your "it" here to mean the fact that GHC is looking for
> readelf on a Mac OS platform. I tend to agree -- I was surprised to
> see this, but I'm almost-totally clueless about these things.
>
> Thanks for the info,
> Richard
>
> PS: There's been much muttering about call stacks and DWARF. I haven't
> a clue what DWARF is, but I always assumed that this nice feature
> would not be available on Macs. What I realized today is that this
> assumption likely stems from the fact that ELF is not for Mac. ELFs
> and DWARFs tend to be found near one another in other settings, but
> perhaps this fact doesn't carry over to computer architectures. :)
>
DWARF is a standard for expressing debug information about compiled
native programs. It is used by almost all modern operating systems
(including OS X; the only notable exception is Windows, naturally).
Indeed the name is a not-so-subtle reference to the fact that DWARF
debug information will often be found within ELF object files.

Recently I have been working on using the mechanisms that came out of
Peter Wortmann's thesis to provide better stack traces and (statistical)
profiling support for Haskell code. While at the moment I am focusing on
Linux, there is little reason why this couldn't (fairly easily, I
suspect) be extended to work on OS X.

Cheers,

- Ben
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