who's maintaining language-c? tis borken on hackage with 7.8 till a new version is pushed

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

As far as functionality goes, I think, the simplest approach would be to use the language-c-quote parser inside language-c — i.e., parse with language-c-quote, and then, convert the language-c-quote AST to the language-c AST. This is as language-c contains quite a bit of functionality to analyse the C AST and c2hs needs that functionality. Rewriting it all in terms of the language-c-quote AST (which is quite different) would be a lot of (and pretty boring) work. Writing an AST to AST conversion should be quite straight forward and much less work.

Concerning performance, I assume that the main difference is that language-c uses ’ByteString’s whereas language-c-quote uses ’String’s for parsing. Using ’ByteString’ in language-c-quote would be a good move anyway and shouldn’t be much work. (It’s also something, I might be able to help with.)

Manuel

Geoffrey Mainland <mainland at apeiron.net>:
> I'm interested in merging language-c and language-c-quote, but I don't
> really have time to work on it at the moment. The two issues are
> performance and functionality; it is not clear to me what would need to
> be added to language-c-quote to make it as functional as language-c, and
> I don't know how much worse language-c-quote performs. Regardless, I
> think the chances of making language-c-quote API compatible with
> language-c are approximately nil.
> 
> Geoff
> 
> On 02/14/2014 03:27 AM, Ian Ross wrote:
>> Benedikt Huber is maintaining language-c -- he's pushed minor changes
>> to the darcs repo recently, so I'm guessing he could also make a new
>> release.  I'd be happy to take over maintainership of language-c (I'm
>> doing some things to c2hs and language-c is one of the main
>> dependencies of that), though on the understanding that it would just
>> be for minor maintenance tasks.
>> 
>> There is a broader question about language-c
>> (https://github.com/haskell/c2hs/issues/57#issuecomment-27450437):
>> there have been various requests to support the most recent C standard
>> as well as C99, which would be a big job, but Geoffrey Mainland has
>> another package (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/language-c-quote)
>> that supports the latest standards, although with less analysis than
>> language-c and probably less extensively tested than language-c (just
>> because it's newer).  Manuel has suggested that merging the two
>> efforts would be a good idea.  I don't know how keen Geoffrey would be
>> on that, I don't know how much work it would be, and I don't know how
>> much work it would be to update the reverse dependencies of the two
>> existing packages (language-c has 13, language-c-quote has 2) to use a
>> new merged package.
>> 
>> If we could get some agreement on a way forward, I'd be open to
>> working on producing a merged language-c and updating c2hs to use the
>> new merged version as a test case.  (Of course, I don't want to do
>> this in a way that results in a third C language package that needs to
>> be supported!)
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Ian.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 14 February 2014 09:10, Carter Schonwald
>> <carter.schonwald at gmail.com <mailto:carter.schonwald at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>>    Hey all,
>>    someone needs to help take over language C maintainer ship,
>>    because its going to be broken on 7.8 unless someone pushes a
>>    sdist'd with a new happy/ alex to hackage (see
>>    https://github.com/haskell/c2hs/issues/64 for an example issue)
>> 
>>    I know Anthony and Jason have at points patched language-c for
>>    their respective needs, so i'm cc'ing em :) 
>> 
>>    -Carter
>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Ian Ross   Tel: +43(0)6804451378   ian at skybluetrades.net
>> <mailto:ian at skybluetrades.net>   www.skybluetrades.net
>> <http://www.skybluetrades.net>