SV: [Haskell-cafe] RFC: "Native -XCPP" Proposal

[Boespflug, Mathieu]

I'm unclear why cpphs needs to be made a dependency of the GHC API and
included as a lib. Could you elaborate? (in the wiki page possibly)

Currently, GHC uses the system preprocessor, as a separate process.
Couldn't we for GHC 7.12 keep to exactly that, save for the fact that by
default GHC would call the cpphs binary for preprocessing, and have the
cpphs binary be available in GHC's install dir somewhere?

fork()/execvce() is cheap. Certainly cheaper than the cost of compiling a
single Haskell module. Can't we keep to this
separate-(and-pluggable)-preprocessor-executable scheme? We'd sidestep most
license tainting concerns that way.


On 8 May 2015 at 11:39, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvriedel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On 2015-05-08 at 11:28:08 +0200, Niklas Larsson wrote:
> > If the intention is to use cpphs as a library, won't the license
> > affect every program built with the GHC API? That seems to be a high
> > price to pay.
>
> Yes, every program linking the `ghc` package would be affected by
> LGPL+SLE albeit in a contained way, as it's mentioned on the Wiki page:
>
> | - As a practical consequence of the //LGPL with
> static-linking-exception//
> |   (LGPL+SLE), **if no modifications are made to the `cpphs`-parts**
> |   (i.e. the LGPL+SLE covered modules) of the GHC code-base,
> |   **then there is no requirement to ship (or make available) any source
> code**
> |   together with the binaries, even if other parts of the GHC code-base
> |   were modified.
>
> However, don't forget we already have this issue w/ integer-gmp, and
> with that the LGPL is in full effect (i.e. w/o a static-linkage-exception!)
>
> In that context, the suggestion was made[1] to handle the cpphs-code
> like the GMP code, i.e. allow a compile-time configuration in the GHC
> build-system to build a cpphs-free (and/or GMP-free) GHC for those
> parties that need to avoid any LGPL-ish code whatsoever in their
> toolchain.
>
> Would that address this concern?
>
>
>  [1]:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/351pur/rfc_native_xcpp_for_ghc_proposal/cr1cdhb
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