using ghc with make

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

GHC might well be able to make use of such stuff too.  In general, one would like to be able to treat a file much like a database, as you suggest, with binary serialisation of data structures into it.

GHC's serialisation also includes a simple communing-up mechanism for "leaves", especially strings.  We build a kind of dictionary, to avoid repeatedly re-serialising the same string.  I guess that any good binary serialisation will want to do something similar.  (Or something more dynamic, a la arithmetic coding.)

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: glasgow-haskell-users-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:glasgow-haskell-users-
| bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of John Meacham
| Sent: 19 April 2006 00:28
| To: glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
| Subject: Re: using ghc with make
| 
| 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⑈
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