[Haskell-cafe] haskell platform question

[Tim Docker]

On 07/06/11 14:03, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 07:34, Tim Docker<twd2 at dockerz.net>  wrote:
>
>> do others go about testing their code with many hackage dependencies against
>> a new ghc? I would have expected that the first thing to do would be get the
>
> We don't, for the most part; ghc is a quickly moving target and
> usually has multiple type theory experiments going on in its code, and
> it's best to avoid new versions until they stabilize and any core
> dependents are updated.  GHC announcements will often mention how
> usable the release is expected to be for us non-type theorists.
> Unless you're a ghc hacker, you shouldn't in general rush into a new
> ghc version.  (This isn't Linux.  The bleeding edge is for type
> theory, not geeks.)

I get your point, but it's not only type theory breakthroughs that are 
in the "bleeding edge". There's significant runtime improvements also:

http://www.mail-archive.com/glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org/msg19780.html

(for certain bytestring usage patterns: >10x improvement in gc time, and 
a third as much memory used!).

I was keen to try this out, but underestimated the effort in how much 
manual tweaking I'd have to do to get all the dependencies of my code 
working.

Perhaps it's best for me to take Simon's advice and wait for the 7.2 
release.

Tim