[jhc] Jhc's tangled base

[John Meacham]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 06:25:29PM -0400, Samuel Bronson wrote:
> Jhc's Prelude seems to be at the center of a giant tangle (SCC) of
> modules. This tangle of modules takes a *lot* of resources to compile
> -- I might possibly have gotten it to typecheck once. What's the plan
> for dealing with it? It almost makes me like GHC's way :-(. It seems
> like a lot of code would need to be moved to remove more than a couple
> of modules from the SCC...

Yes, this is a known issue and has been getting better with each
release. I don't want to make major changes just yet, as the complete
rewrite of how numerics will work will change everything. (and has
already started to)

> One problem is that the code to implement Read and Show pulls in
> Numeric and the list functions currently in Prelude, which pull in a
> whole bunch of other stuff... including Foreign.Marshal.Utils,
> Foreign.Marshal.Alloc, Foreign.Ptr, and lots more...
> 
> Actually, I think the list functions from Prelude could escape the
> tangle if Maybe didn't derive Read...

Yeah, it is a little subtle how to rearrange things properly. another
thing is I eventually want to create a smaller 'core' library jhc-foo
which will just have the minimum required to compile anything with jhc.
which is a lot less than it used to be actually, now that I am getting
rid of 'magic' names known by the compiler and actually doing things in
the source code.

In any case, I don't want to tackle this until separate compilation is
working as that will likely change the issues and I don't want to work
on two major changes to the same subsystem at once.

Also, on a philosophical note, ideally I would just make jhc compile
things a whole lot faster rather than try to give it less to compile :)

        John


-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈