[Haskell-cafe] Re: #haskell works

[Simon Marlow]

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Simon,
> 
> Thursday, December 20, 2007, 4:01:59 PM, you wrote:
> 
>> Fixing it all properly means some fairly significant architectural changes,
>> and dropping the via-C backend
> 
> oh, thank you. from my POV, C backend still may be used together with
> "non-registerized" compilers. in particular, i hope that win-x64 will
> be supported at least in this way
> 
> noone asked my question about plans of win-x64 support. it's important
> for my users, so i ask you again - can you please implement it?
> 
> to other GHC users: i'm pretty sure that win-x64 support will not be
> implemented if it's required only for me. so, if someone need it -
> please write about this to ghc debelopers

It'll get implemented when (a) there is a working mingw64, and (b) it is 
important enough to enough people.  As I understand it, (a) is getting 
closer, but there's still no official release.

My guess is that it's a couple of weeks' work.  Win64 is quite different 
from the x86-64 Unix ABI: the calling convention is different, which means 
that all the FFI stuff has to be ported (the NCG foreign call support, GHCi 
foreign calls, rts/Adjustor.c).  It took me a few days to get these working 
for x86-64 on Unix.

What's more, while x86-64 on Unix is nicer in many ways than the 32-bit 
ABI, Win64 is significantly more horrible than Win32 (just MHO based on 
memories of reading a couple of MSDN articles), so I don't expect it to be 
a very enjoyable couple of weeks work :)

Cheers,
	Simon