External STG Interpreter blog post

[John Ericson]

Hi Csaba,

Thanks for your interest. I'm not sure whether it would be better to do 
a call sooner or later, but certainly want to get to this at some point. 
Fendor and Sylvain (and occasionally I too) have been chipping away at 
multiple home packages, which I hope could help with these sorts of 
whole program things. I'm sort of thinking milestones like:

1. Proper Int64 => Single sdist for GHC the library that is truely 
target/configures-script-choice agnostic, but sdist contains vendored 
generated code

2. Multiple home packages => Maybe easier to rig up what you have with 
GHC's driver, though I suppose not needed for Hadrian since it uses 
one-shot mode.

3. Extensible interface directory => Can better upstream your work to 
save STG for later, needed for Hadrian / one-shot mode.

4. Matthew's proposal => can get whole program closure for just for TH, 
pruning away runtime stuff.

5. Put it all together => single sdist that is much more minimally 
processed, with TH instead of including generated code (no vendoring or 
Setup.hs evils necessary). Easier to work on IDE stuff with either sdist 
or fresh checkout of GHC.

So it's quite a while before GHC is ready to fully leverage your work on 
the TH front, I think, but we could still talk through things in advance 
of that if people are interested.

Also, included Sylvain Henry in the thread who's now back from paternity 
leave,

John

On 4/20/21 5:38 PM, Csaba Hruska wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In theory the ext-stg interpereter could be used to run TH, but it is 
> not done yet.
> I'm interested in optimization much much more, but I deliberately 
> designed the ext-stg ir/tooling to be simple and easy to use and 
> understand for others so that an average Haskell programmer could 
> implement his ideas or do his experiment.
> I'm also open for discussion about the possibilities. We can have a 
> video meeting about this if you'd like to.
>
> Cheers,
> Csaba
>
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 7:57 PM John Ericson 
> <john.ericson at obsidian.systems> wrote:
>
>     Indeed it is!
>
>     I also am very much hoping this can be the missing piece we need
>     to allow Template Haskell to work with a stage 0 GHC, so that we
>     can safely use TH in GHC itself even when the ABI is changing. See
>     https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/issues/162
>     <https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/issues/162> for
>     details, where I've also linked Csaba's blog post. (And maybe also
>     https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/cross-compilation/roadmap
>     <https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/cross-compilation/roadmap>
>     for more background, and related things like
>     https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/412
>     <https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/412>.)
>
>     TH could perhaps be used to replace some of the ad-hoc code gen we
>     have for e.g. RTS constants and primops. This in turn would
>     simplify the build system, allowing for `cabal install ghc` to
>     work without shipping generated Haskell code in the sdist.
>
>     John
>
>     On 4/12/21 4:51 AM, Simon Peyton Jones via ghc-devs wrote:
>>
>>     That’s extremely impressive, Csaba.
>>
>>     Maybe of interest to folk who have been thinking about “fat
>>     interface files”.
>>
>>
>>     Simon
>>
>>     *From:*ghc-devs <ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org>
>>     <mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org> *On Behalf Of *Csaba Hruska
>>     *Sent:* 10 April 2021 11:49
>>     *To:* GHC developers <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
>>     <mailto:ghc-devs at haskell.org>
>>     *Subject:* External STG Interpreter blog post
>>
>>     Hello,
>>
>>     I've written a blog post about GHC-WPC's external stg interpreter.
>>     https://www.patreon.com/posts/external-stg-49857800
>>     <https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.patreon.com%2Fposts%2Fexternal-stg-49857800&data=04%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C1535f88608f549dabb8108d8fc0e4c3f%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637536486264337310%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C2000&sdata=VXa%2FhDs1ePRS5NTu04buv42yj%2BFKw%2FJzBLQJSwp8qTs%3D&reserved=0>
>>
>>     Feedback is welcome.
>>
>>     Cheers,
>>
>>     Csaba
>>
>>
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>
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