GHC 5.01 "Zarjaz": Test release for Windows

Lescher Christian christian.lescher@icn.siemens.de
Wed, 18 Jul 2001 13:41:00 +0200


Here's my first feedback concerning GHC 5.01 for Win:

There are significant improvements of compilation speed (about 20% faster, sometimes even more) and the generated code's size (about 40% smaller). And the new "--make" option and GHCi are really great features!

However, I already discovered some smaller problems, too:
- The included version of HaXml (including dtdtohaskell.exe etc.) is not up-to-date.
- I had some "Dr. Watson"s when leaving GHCi. I think, it was in a case with a possible heap overflow. I'll try to analyze it further.
- When running GHC with the "--make" option, sometimes it stoppes with an error message ("the impossible happened" ...). I will also try to make this situations reproducable.

Some smaller problems are:
- When leaving out the "-o" option, GHC4.08.2 defaulted to "main.exe", but GHC5 doesn't anymore (produces "a.out").
- I didn't find a way yet to force GHCi to load a module in "interpreted" mode, even if an up-to-date object file is present. Is there a way to do this without deleting .hi/.o first?

Christian