RFC: Compiler plugins for GHC (was: Release/git plans)

[Max Bolingbroke]

On 23 January 2011 00:31, austin seipp <as at hacks.yi.org> wrote:
> or what the current state of dynamic linking on
> windows is.

AFAIK it is meant to work. What I'm not sure about is whether any of
the plugins code will have to be modified to make use of it. I suspect
it won't since IIRC I went through the GHCi symbol loading code, which
should have been extended to load symbols from shared libraries just
fine.

There is also an issue about whether the GHC executable is statically
linked to libGHC or not. If it is, then you need to build GHC with
---export-dynamic (on Windows/Linux -  there is another flag on OS X)
so libGHC symbols are exported from the GHC executable. This is
essential because you want a loaded plugin to link against the shared
data in a *running GHC*, not a new instance of it.

With any luck, nowadays GHC dynamically links to libGHC, in which case
this is all a non-issue.

Cheers,
Max