[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Sun Microsystems and Haskell.org joint project on OpenSPARC

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2008-07-24 at 16:43 +1200, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> On 24 Jul 2008, at 3:52 am, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> [Sun have donated a T5120 server + USD10k to develop
>   support for Haskell on the SPARC.]
> 
> This is wonderful news.
> 
> I have a 500MHz UltraSPARC II on my desktop running Solaris 2.10.

I have 500MHz UltraSPARC II on my desktop running Gentoo Linux. :-)

> Some time ago I tried to install GHC 6.6.1 on it, but ended up
> with something that compiles to C ok, but then invokes some C
> compiler with option "-fwrapv", which no compiler on that machine
> accepts, certainly none that was present when I installed it.

I've got ghc 6.8.2 working, but only -fvia-C and only unregisterised.

"-fwrapv" is an option to some version of gcc, but I couldn't tell you
which.

> I would really love to be able to use GHC on that machine.

Me too :-), or in my case use it a bit quicker. Unregisterised ghc
builds are pretty slow.

> I also have an account on a T1 server, but the research group
> who Sun gave it to chose to run Linux on it, of all things.

Our tentative plan is to partition our T2 server using logical domains
and run both Solaris and Linux. We'd like to set up ghc build bots on
both OSs.

> So binary distributions for SPARC/Solaris and SPARC/Linux would
> be very very nice things for this new project to deliver early.

I guess this is something that anyone with an account on the box could
do. So once we get to the stage where we're handing out accounts then
hopefully this would follow.

The project isn't aiming to get the registerised C backend working
nicely, we're aiming to get a decent native backend. That should also be
much less fragile by not depending on the version of gcc so closely.

> (Or some kind of source distribution that doesn't need a working
> GHC to start with.)

That's a tad harder. Needs lot of build system hacking.

Duncan