Potential GSoC proposal: Reduce the speed gap between 'ghc -c' and 'ghc --make'

[Mikhail Glushenkov]

Hi all,

[Hoping it's not too late.]

During my work on parallelising 'ghc --make' [1] I encountered a
stumbling block: running 'ghc --make' can be often much faster than
using separate compile ('ghc -c') and link stages, which means that
any parallel build tool built on top of 'ghc -c' will be significantly
handicapped [2]. As far as I understand, this is mainly due to the
effects of interface file caching - 'ghc --make' only needs to parse
and load them once. One potential improvement (suggested by Duncan
Coutts [3]) is to produce whole-package interface files and load them
in using mmap().

Questions:

Would implementing this optimisation be a worthwhile/realistic GSoC project?
What are other potential ways to bring 'ghc -c' performance up to par
with 'ghc --make'?


[1] https://github.com/23Skidoo/ghc-parmake
[2] https://gist.github.com/1360470
[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/qwj5j/the_cabal_of_my_dreams/c41a5gx

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