GHC 6.4 release candidates available (breakage on suse 9.2 x86 or x86-64)

[Simon Marlow]

On 24 February 2005 11:12, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

> Ideally, if ghc were implemented in something closer to Haskell'98,
> it would be possible to double-bootstrap up from gcc -> nhc98 ->
> ghc unregisterised -> ghc registerised, on almost any new platform.
> But the amount of work required to 98-ify ghc is considerable (there
> are 148 kLoC to check), and it is hard to say whether it would
> be worthwhile.  Maybe someone fancies tackling it as a medium-size
> project?

It's feasible, but unfortunately probably not practical.  Not only would
someone have to do the work, we'd have to maintain the Haskell 98
version too.  That's yet another way to build GHC, and there are already
too many variables for us to test them all.

However, a more reasonable approach might be to remove the platform
dependencies from GHC and the libraries it requires for bootstrapping.
That is, make it so that unregisterised .hc files are
platform-independent.  I think we used to have this property in the
distant past, but it got lost somewhere along the way.  It would mean
banishing platform differences into C code wherever necessary, which
would result in more C code and less Haskell code, but it might be
worthwhile.

Cheers,
	Simon