Tier 1 architectures

[Ben Gamari]

Simon Peyton Jones <simon.peytonjones at gmail.com> writes:

> Ben, Matthew, Moritz, and friends
>
> Is this wiki page about architectures still accurate?
> https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/platforms
>
Hi Simon,

Indeed there were a few inaccuracies on that page; I have fixed
these and generally cleaned up the page.

> For example, ARM is not Tier 1, or "apple silicon".
>
> Yet I know some of our developers have invested lots of effort in other
> architectures, so maybe those efforts are not reflected here.
>
Fairly recently there has been work on RISC-V (rv64) and PowerPC
(ppc64le), as well as some work on s390x via LLVM. However, I wouldn't
consider any of these Tier 1.

> Relevant is Moritz's post about 32-bit architectures
> <https://discourse.haskell.org/t/running-project-built-on-raspberry-pi-with-cabal-gives-weird-errors/2429/6>
> .
>
> We should in due course add Javascript and Web Assembly as Tier 1 back ends?
>
Indeed, that is the plan although 9.6 will rather ship these as Tier 2
targets.

> Are we saying "if your customer bases uses Tier 2 architectures, you can't
> rely on GHC from one release to the next"?  I wonder if there are companies
> for which Tier-2 architectures are mission-critical.  Mis-aligned
> expectations cause upset.
>
I have heard that some people are using amd64/FreeBSD, although that can very
nearly be promoted to a Tier 1 now. Bodigrim once mentioned that he was
considering deploying Haskell on s390x, although I'm not sure what
became of that. Otherwise I would be quite surprised if any commercial
customers are relying on any of the other Tier 2 or Tier 3 platforms.

> I mention all this because it is relevant to our stability guarantees.
> Every time we release we should point to this list.
>
My sense is that this list should ideally rather live in the users guide
since it changes from release to release.

Cheers,

- Ben
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