GHC on Snow Leopard: best practices?

[Simon Marlow]

On 07/10/2009 21:58, Barney Stratford wrote:
> I'm back in Cambridge now. Snowdonia was great, and just as wet as
> expected.
>
> As far as I'm aware, nobody's got a fully functioning Snow Leopard GHC
> yet. Just before going away, I tried to use my partly-functioning 64-bit
> GHC to build 6.10, but found that the stage 1 compiler segfaulted.
>
> My plan now is to get 6.8.3 fully working so that we all have something,
> if a little old, that works. (This is because I need it for another
> project.) Once I've managed this, I'll post a full set of instructions
> to get everyone else going too. Then I plan to attempt to get 6.12
> working, and provide a binary that can be used for bootstrapping. (I may
> need some pointers for this.)
>
> Incidentally, 6.12 doesn't appear to be in
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/ , only in the Darcs repo. Was that
> intentional?
>
> So far, the sticking point has been getting the interactive linker to
> work. Snow Leopard has much tighter security than its predecessors, so
> we have to use mmap. Unfortunately, the mmap version of GHC's linker
> also requires mremap, which is a Linux-only extension that Snow Leopard
> doesn't have.

I believe we fixed the mremap dependency in 6.10, and that was also when 
we added support for libffi.  I expect you'll have a much easier time 
getting GHCi to work with 6.10 or 6.12, so use 6.8.x for bootstrapping only.

Cheers,
	Simon