[Haskell-cafe] raspberrypi and ghci

[Ben Gamari]

"Vasili I. Galchin" <vigalchin at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Ben,
>
Hi Vasili!
>
> Cabal also doesn't seem to be supported on raspberrypi??
>
Cabal should run perfectly well on as should most pure Haskell libraries
found on Hackage. Cabal is packaged for Debian under the name
`cabal-install`.

> What is the URL of your group that is porting Haskell  to the raspberrypi?
>
It's not so much an organized group as a few loosely-coupled individual
GHC developers interested in ensuring GHC is well-supported on ARM
(Cc'd; apologies if I have forgotten someone). While the Raspberry Pi
should work, I don't know of any developers who actively test on it due
to its quite anemic specifications; even on my four-core Odroid XU a GHC
build takes much of the day. There have been a few issues [1,2] specific to
the pre-ARMv6 (e.g. quite old) ARM core that the Raspberry Pi uses but I
believe these have been sorted out (unfortunately #9125 will still be
present in GHC 7.10 as it is apparentlly an LLVM bug).

The GHC-on-ARM effort doesn't have a website per-se.  I occassionally
write around related issues on my blog [3,4]. The GHC Wiki has some
relevant material, although it can be difficult to tell what is
out-of-date. The mailing lists and issue tracker are good repositories
for knowledge when things go awry.

I think it is fair to say that much of the compiler engineering work is
done and stable; the GHC 7.8 builds on my ARM boxes are just as
functional as my x86_64-based laptop. Most of the issues we have
encountered arose from bugs in external components of the compilation
process (linkers, in particular, are problematic) and maintaining the
LLVM backend (which should improve notably with GHC 7.12 which will
support only one LLVM release).

All of the developers mentioned above are available on IRC (#ghc on
Freenode) and the ghc-devs mailing list. If you run in to trouble don't
hesitate to contact me.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9125
[2] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8951
[3] http://smart-cactus.org/~ben/posts/2014-03-06-compiling-ghc-7.8-on-arm.html
[4] http://smart-cactus.org/~ben/posts/2014-11-28-state-of-llvm-backend.html
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