Including remote-iserv upstream?

[Simon Marlow]

Absolutely, let's get this code upstream.  Just put it up on Phabricator
and I'll be happy to review.

I recall that we wanted to split up the ghci lib into modules that are
compiled with stage0 (the client) and modules compiled with stage1 (the
server).  Is that a part of your plans?  I think it would be a good cleanup.

Cheers
Simon

On 14 January 2017 at 15:34, Shea Levy <shea at shealevy.com> wrote:

> Hi Simon, devs,
>
> As part of my work to get TH working when cross-compiling to iOS, I've
> developed remote-iserv [1] (not yet on hackage), a set of libraries for
> letting GHC communicate with an external interpreter that may be on
> another machine. So far, there are only three additions of note on top
> of what the ghci library offers:
>
> 1. The remote-iserv protocol has facilities for the host sending
>    archives and object files the target doesn't have (dynlibs not yet
>    implemented but there's no reason they can't be). This works by
>    having the server send back a Bool after a loadObj or loadArchive
>    indicating whether it needs the object sent, and then just reading it
>    off the Pipe.
> 2. The remote-iserv lib abstracts over how the Pipe it communicates over
>    is obtained. One could imagine e.g. an ssh-based implementation that
>    just uses stdin and stdout* for the communication, the implementation
>    I've actually tested on is a TCP server advertised over bonjour.
> 3. There is a protocol version included to address forwards
>    compatibility concerns.
>
> As the library currently stands, it works for my use case. However,
> there would be a number of benefits if it were included with ghc (and
> used for local iserv as well):
>
> 1. Reduced code duplication (the server side copies iserv/src/Main.hs
>    pretty heavily)
> 2. Reduced overhead keeping up to date with iserv protocol changes
> 3. No need for an extra client-side process, GHC can just open the Pipe
>    itself
> 4. Proper library distribution in the cross-compiling case. The client
>    needs to be linked with the ghci lib built by the stage0 compiler, as
>    it runs on the build machine, while the server needs to be linked
>    with the ghci lib built by the stage1 compiler. With a distribution
>    created by 'make install', we only get the ghci lib for the
>    target. Currently, I'm working around this by just using the ghci lib
>    of the bootstrap compiler, which in my case is built from the same
>    source checkout, but of course this isn't correct. If these libs were
>    upstream, we'd only need one version of the client lib exposed and
>    one version of the server lib exposed and could have them be for the
>    build machine and the target, respectively
> 5. Better haskell hackers than I invested in the code ;)
>
> Thoughts on this? Would this be welcome upstream in some form?
>
> Thanks,
> Shea
>
> * Note that, in the general case, having the server process's stdio be
>   the same as the compiler's (as we have in the local-iserv case) is not
>   possible. Future work includes adding something to the protocol to
>   allow forwarding stdio over the protocol pipe, to make GHCi usable
>   without watching the *server*'s console.
>
> [1]: https://github.com/obsidiansystems/remote-iserv
>
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