Help with Win64 port

[Simon Marlow]

On 30/06/2010 22:15, George Brewster wrote:
> Hey,
> I'd really like to see ghc working on 64-bit Windows, so I've decided to
> take at least a quick stab at getting it going.
> Having talked to some of the people on #ghc, it sounds like the first
> thing to do is get an unregisterised build going, which sounded like it
> may be managable. So to that end, I've pulled the 6.12 branch, done a
> 32-bit build, changed the build config to do an unregisterised build and
> turn off the native code generator, found a version of mingw64 which
> seems to work for me, stuffed it in in place of the in-tree mingw, and
> got my build to fail.
>
> At this point, I'd like to get a general idea of what my strategy should
> be. I read the Building/Porting page on the wiki, and used the config
> file there as an example of how to do an unregisterised build, but have
> been ignoring anything related to the hc file bootstrapping process, as
> I have a working ghc on my platform, just of the wrong bitness.
>
> In particular, if there are any changes that you know I'll need to make
> to the source to get this working, please let me know. The more of those
> I learn about now, the less fumbling around I'll have to do as things
> break. In particular, is there some place where I indicate that I'm
> build a 64-bit compiler? I didn't find anything with a quick look.
>
> I have very little time to work on it, and no familiarity with ghc
> internals, so I wouldn't expect much, but I'm hoping I can get it going...

We'd like to support cross-compilation for this kind of scenario, but it 
isn't working right now.  I just created this ticket and wiki page:

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4163

HC bootstrapping in theory works, but is suffering from bitrot at the 
moment, see

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3472

a lot of manual intervention is required to bootstrap right now.

The way forward is to get cross-compilation working, if you'd like to 
help us out that would be great.

Cheers,
	Simon