ghci and unfoldings?

[Conal Elliott]

Hi Brandon. Thanks for the reply. I’m not sure that it addresses what I was
trying to ask. GHCi *does* invoke plugins and even reloads those plugins
dynamically when their source code changes. So in this sense ghci does
enable optimization, even if it doesn’t perform much optimization on its
own. And of course plugins and unfolding are not just about optimization.

I’m not looking for ghci to do optimization, but rather to enable me to
more easily develop my GHC plugins. It’s *almost* there already. I just
need access to unfoldings from other modules for my plugin’s use.

For context, I’m rebuilding my Haskell-to-hardware compiler
<https://github.com/conal/talk-2015-haskell-to-hardware>, which relies on
giving a non-standard but principled interpretation of Haskell programs via
a conversion through the language of cartesian closed categories (CCCs).
The first back-end is hardware generation (e.g., via Verilog), and I have
plans for several other CCC-based interpretations.

In addition to facilitating my plugin development, hosting in ghci will
make it much more pleasant for others to *use* the plugin during
exploratory programming, just as with ghci use in general. With access to
unfoldings, users will be able to generate circuit diagrams and Verilog
like those in my compiler talk immediately and directly from within ghci. I
also intend to make a GPU back-end for fast interactive graphics etc, which
would be much more fun in ghci than with batch compilation.
I hope this explanation clarifies my goals and motivation. I hope there’s a
way to access unfoldings from ghci currently or with a small amount of
effort.

Regards, - Conal

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 7:00 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 9:40 PM, Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net> wrote:
>
>> I'm developing a GHC plugin (using HERMIT), and I'd like to use ghci to
>> speed up development. I'm able to do so, except that my plugin critically
>> needs access to unfoldings, which appear to be unavailable in ghci. A
>> little experimenting with ghc shows me that "-O" is the key, but "-O" is
>> incompatible with "--interactive" (as in ghci). Is there any way to
>> persuade ghci to make unfoldings available?
>
>
> I think unfoldings are only done as part of optimization, and the bytecode
> backend doesn't support optimization at all.
>
> --
> brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine
> associates
> allbery.b at gmail.com
> ballbery at sinenomine.net
> unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad
> http://sinenomine.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/attachments/20160117/183d2e79/attachment.html>