GHC development asks too much of the host system

[Moritz Angermann]

Hi Hecate,

I don't think this is entirely fair in either direction.  So sharing my
personal experience
might shed some light.  I've often worked on GHC on fairly weak machines.
However
the ability to use HLS on GHC or even the ability to load GHC into GHCi are
fairly
recent additions.

I don't run the full test-suite either much.

The general development experience has more been closer to this:
- pick an issue I want to work on
- checkout the relevant branch (or master)
- kick off a ghc build (hadrian)
- start looking for the relevant code in GHC to address this.
- build a tiny reproducer (if possible, or run the relevant test from the
test-suite if available) -- once the initial ghc is build.
- hack on the codebase; rebuild (subsequent rebuilds are fairly fast)
- retry the reproducer, iterate until done.

Most of my development has been without much codelevel help and at most a
syntax highlighter. This is decidedly different from the experience you can
have
working on haskell libraries with the availability of ghcid, hls, ... would
it be nice
if ghc development would be that nice as well? I'd assume so, I've just
never
even tried.

Cheers,
 Moritz


On Tue, 19 Jul 2022 at 18:21, Hécate <hecate at glitchbra.in> wrote:

> Hello ghc-devs,
>
> I hadn't made significant contributions to the GHC code base in a while,
> until a few days ago, where I discovered that my computer wasn't able to
> sustain running the test suite, nor handle HLS well.
>
> Whether it is my OS automatically killing the process due to oom-killer
> or just the fact that I don't have a war machine, I find it too bad and
> I'm frankly discouraged.
> This is not the first time such feedback emerges, as the documentation
> task force for the base library was unable to properly onboard some
> people from third-world countries who do not have access to hardware
> we'd consider "standard" in western Europe or some parts of North
> America. Or at least "standard" until even my standard stuff didn't cut
> it anymore.
>
> So yeah, I'll stay around but I'm afraid I'm going to have to focus on
> projects for which the feedback loop is not on the scale of hours , as
> this is a hobby project.
>
> Hope this will open some eyes.
>
> Cheers,
> Hécate
>
> --
> Hécate ✨
> 🐦: @TechnoEmpress
> IRC: Hecate
> WWW: https://glitchbra.in
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>
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