No "last core parallel slowdown" on OS X

[Austin Seipp]

Excerpts from Dave Bayer's message of Sat Apr 18 19:05:34 -0500 2009:
> Yikes! You're right. I never noticed, but I never had an 8 GB Mac  
> before.
> 
> I looked at ./configure for the GHC 6.10.2 source, and realized there  
> was already something there. I tried
> 
> ./configure --build=x86_64-apple-darwin
> 
> and it didn't work. However, it did give me something to Google,  
> leading me to
> 
> Ticket #2965 (new feature request)
> GHC on OS X does not compile 64-bit
> 1/19/09
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2965
> 
> Apparently this isn't a one-liner. Once my semester ends, I'll see if  
> I can help.
> 
> I've got to wonder if it would be less work to sneak a gift Mac Pro  
> past Microsoft security, and just wait? ;-)
> 
> The GHC team has been busting their humps on parallel code lately, and  
> OS X does so much better... They should stop having to apologize in  
> papers for the poor parallel performance of Linux itself. A decked-out  
> Mac Pro should be the flagship platform for 64 bit, parallel GHC.
> 
> On Apr 18, 2009, at 1:46 PM, Daniel Peebles wrote:
> 
> > That looks great! I wonder what about Mac OS leads to such good  
> > performance...
> >
> > Now if only we could get a nice x86_64-producing GHC for Mac OS too, I
> > could use all my RAM and the extra registers my Mac Pro gives me :)
> 

Please add yourself to the CC list of the bug - more people need to
show they care! I'm currently the owner of the bug, so if you bother
me enough I'll get to working on it quicker (once I have more time...)
At the very least, once the build system fixes are in place to allow
hc-bootstrapping, it should happen fairly quickly. Right now I'm just
not quite sure what the full path necessary is for getting a copy of
GHC head to be 64-bit on OS X.

Daniel, have you gotten anywhere with your version of GHC 6.6 on OS X?

Austin