using ghc with make

[John Meacham]

On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 10:26:18AM +0400, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> > FWIW ginsu and DrIFT both use make and don't use ghcs --make feature. I
> > find this can be faster once your projects grow beyond a certain size as
> > it takes ghc a while to figure out which files need to be rebuilt with
> > --make
> 
> if that is due to the time of reading .hi files, my alternative Binary
> library should help in some future

Interesting, A big bottleneck in jhc right now is reading the (quite
large) binary ho and hl files on startup. a few things I have wanted out
of a binary library are: 

 * the ability to create a hash of the structure of the underlying data
   type, to verify you are reading data in the right format.
 * extensible type-indexed sets (implemented hackily in Info.Binary in
   jhc)
 * being able to jump over unneeded data, as in go directly to the 112th
   record, or the third field in a data structure without having to
   slurp through everything that came before it.
 * VSDB[1] style ACID updates as an option.
 * VSDB style write-time optimized constant hash table. I don't mind
   spending extra time when writing library files to speed up their
   usage.
 * mmap based reading.

I was going to get around to writing this sometime, but perhaps there is
room for a collaborative project in there. Is your code available
somewhere bulat?

        John

[1] VSDB is my very simple database that ensures full ACID semantics using
  just the file guarentees of unix, including the weaker guarentees of
  NFS. http://repetae.net/john/computer/vsdb/
  Sort of like STM on the filesystem.

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈