[Haskell-cafe] faster compiling for ghc

[Evan Laforge]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:22 PM, David Virebayre
<dav.vire+haskell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 7:18 AM, Bulat Ziganshin
> <bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello Evan,
>>
>> Thursday, November 12, 2009, 4:02:17 AM, you wrote:
>>
>> > Recently the "go" language was announced at golang.org.  There's not a
>> > lot in there to make a haskeller envious, except one real big one:
>> > compilation speed.  The go compiler is wonderfully speedy.
>>
>> are you seen hugs, for example? i think that ghc is slow because it's
>> written in haskell and compiled by itself
>
> If I understood, Evan is interested in ideas to speed up compilation.
> As far as I know, hugs is an interpreter, not a compiler.

Well, the bottom line is a faster "make a change, see it in action"
cycle.  As I mentioned, ghci's bytecode compiler is pretty good as
long as I don't have to recompile the unchanged modules, but I've
never been able to get it to work once I have C libraries to link in,
it doesn't take the same flags as the real linker (and it's OS X so
there's that funky framework stuff) and no matter how many libraries I
try to put in manually it has some missing symbol.

I should give hugs a try, but I suspect it may have the same problem.
I also seem to recall it can't save and reload the bytecode for
unchanged modules, which is going to be slow no matter how fast the
actual compilation is.  Hugs is also going to have trouble linking in
the ghc api... though to load code at runtime it might be faster and
smaller to link in hugs rather than the ghc api.