[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell on ARM (was Re: ANN: Topkata)

[Jeremy Shaw]

At Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:43:45 -0400,
Braden Shepherdson wrote:

> I recently acquired the ARM-based Nokia N810 (and <3 it), powered by 
> Maemo. Running a uname -a on it:

> I might be one to attempt this, as I know C and ARM-ish asm decently 
> well and have a powerful desktop to compile on. I have no familiarity
> with GHC internals, though. 

I think that is a fine set of qualifications. The porting process
requires low-level knowledge of C, asm, and the ARM more than GHC
internals. It's mostly stuff like #defining what the names of the ARM
registers are, and which ones are preserved across C function calls.

Also, if you are not starting until at least Sept, waiting for 6.10
might be a good choice, since it sounds like the backend will be
changing quite a bit. No point in doing it twice if there is no rush.

j.

ps. Perhaps we should have some sort of GHC on the ARM hackathon when
6.10 comes out. I think there are quite a few people who have tried or
who are interested in trying a port. Having more heads look at it
would probably make things go faster.