[Haskell-cafe] building ghc on arch linux ARM?

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Dienstag, den 10.04.2012, 13:04 +0200 schrieb Yves Parès:
> > All these are not cross-compiled, but natively
> > compiled on the repective architecture, and I don’t think it is
> easily
> > possible to cross-compile GHC itself even today. 
> 
> So how did they get compiled the first time? How do you get a GHC
> working on or for an ARM platform if you don't use Debian?
> And why was Joey Hess talking about performance issues?
> (I'll be eventually interested, as Graham Klyne suggested earlier, in
> compiling for Raspberry Pi, if the hardware suits).

well, GHC was more portable in version 6.8 and before (this is not
cross-compiling, at least not really:
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Porting

When I ported GHC to s390x half a year ago, I think I started with
porting 6.8 and then kept building the next released version with the
previous. It would be great, though, if porting current versions
directly would become possible again.

Most of these architectures do not have a native code generator (so they
are compiled via C) and are unregisterized, i.e. GHC knows nothing about
their registers. Both cause a performance penalty; I don’t know numbers.
I assume this is what Joey refers to. But maybe also that ARM machines
tend to be slower :-)

I’m happily running git-annex on a NSLU2 (266MHz/23MB RAM ARM NAS
device) and have done so before it was registerized, so it is definitely
a useful target for Haskell.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim Breitner
  e-Mail: mail at joachim-breitner.de
  Homepage: http://www.joachim-breitner.de
  Jabber-ID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de
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