[Haskell-cafe] External representation of GHC bytecode

[Luite Stegeman]

On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 5:41 AM, Sean Seefried <sean.seefried at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 1. This could solve the Template Haskell on cross compiler's dilemma. Currently, the problem is that a cross compiler will produce object code for the target machine which cannot be run on the host machine. But if this were bytecode the problem would be trivial to solve.
>

It still wouldn't be trivial since all kinds of platform assumptions
are still baked into the code, for example the word size,
sizes/alignment of foreign data types, endianness and all error
constants in the base library. If you compile a program with the wrong
constants you get very weird error messages and problems (I've had
this problem). Bytecode also doesn't support certain constructs, like
unboxed tuples, so it'd need to be extended if we wanted to run a
whole program from bytecode.

To do it properly would involve configuring packages for two different
platforms, which would either mean supporting multiple
versions/targets in a single GHC and package db, or a massive overhaul
of how platform specifics are handled in libraries. Either way it'd be
a lot more work than compiling Template Haskell code for the target
and shipping it there to run it [1]. Eventually I'd still like to see
multiple targets properly supported, for example for heterogeneous
cloud haskell environments, but given the changes required in the
Cabal and GHC, this looks like a strictly longer term option.

luite

[1] https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-December/007555.html