distributed compilation by GHC

[Simon Marlow]

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Joel,
> 
> Thursday, April 5, 2007, 1:33:27 PM, you wrote:
> 
> my sentence should be read as "is it true...?" - i had lost a track
> whether it was incorporated in GHC or not. the idea is that GHC should be
> extended to be able to write out dependencies list built in the --make
> mode. Then rather simple scripts may be used to distribute the work
> among many cores/boxes
> 
> who can enlighten me about presence/absence of multi-core GHC support?

GHC itself doesn't support multithreaded --make compilation.  I have some old 
patches to do this, which I used for the measurements in the Haskell Workshop 
2005 paper, but it was never completely robust.

This is one reason I wrote the 'setup makefile' patch for Cabal[1] recently. 
With that patch you can get parallel compilation on a multiprocessor using 'make 
-j' when using Cabal.  (I know that not everyone has make, it isn't intended to 
be a portable solution - the ultimate goal is to use Cabal in GHC's build 
system, where you need make anyway).

Cheers,
	Simon

[1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cabal-devel/2007-March/000448.html