Text and changing number primops in GHC 9.2

[John Ericson]

The way I see it, the primops are an implementation detail of GHC 
that---unfortunately, but like many others---leaks. If we are to stable 
interface, it should be a bunch of *un*boxed wrappers in a separate 
module that make no claims of being the actual primops. It's entirely 
the conflation of primops / prim types and unboxing that's led to the 
current unfortunate situation.

Also, keep in mind that the precipitating change---that the boxed ones 
now wrapped the fixed-size types---has already happened, and had to 
happen to allow the Aarch64 NCG to land. Yes, these primops changes were 
already being planned, but the urgency for 9.2 is separate, and because 
we want:

  * 1 round, and not 2 rounds of breaking changes
  * changing the primops and types being boxed together in fact leads to
    *less* breakage overall in many situations.

So yes, I hope things can go differently in the future, but slamming the 
breaks on 9.2 at the last minute to ossify a leaked interface gets us 
too much of the costs of stabilizing without the benefits.

John

On 2/17/21 12:38 PM, David Feuer wrote:
> I still don't understand why GHC is making this change in such a 
> breaky way without even going through the proposal process.
>
> On Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 12:35 PM John Ericson 
> <john.ericson at obsidian.systems> wrote:
>
>     Hi all,
>
>     First, background. I have a PR
>     https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/4492
>     <https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/4492> that is
>     one of the moving pieces for
>     https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/19026
>     <https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/19026>, which is
>     slated for 9.2 according to Ben's email
>     https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2021-February/019478.html
>     <https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2021-February/019478.html>.
>     (I just added the milestone to the issue to reflect this.)
>
>     Despite this being a breaking change (to unstable interfaces)
>     containers, bytestring, and binary could all updated in a way that
>     didn't used CPP. (See the linked PRs in the GHC !4492's
>     description). Text is a different case, because the unboxed
>     computation there is more pervasive. The current PR is
>     https://github.com/haskell/text/pull/305
>     <https://github.com/haskell/text/pull/305>, and uses CPP for 9.2.
>     We have a few different options:
>
>       * Keep as is. There will surely be no perf regressions this way
>         on any of the supported compilers. This does however mean
>         adding CPP for 9.2 before the associated GHC change lands in
>         master. I think that's fine---inevitable even based on the
>         current policy for how GHC submodules are bumped---but it's
>         given many library maintainers the heebie jeebies.
>       * Try the same tricks in the other PRs of using hyper-local
>         unboxing that is easy to unbox away. This will be a bit ugly
>         however than the other cases, and I am not sure whether it
>         won't be a regression for the oldest supported GHCs.
>       * Do the above, but bump the base version to the point where
>         there are no perf regressions with the oldest supported GHCs
>         (because those compilers are no longer supported). If we bump
>         the version more aggressively, perhaps we can get rid of much
>         of the unboxing altogether / otherwise get rid of the ugliness.
>
>     We'll need to reach some sort of decision here to move forward.
>
>     I'll also add that while Oleg Grenrus has helped merge a
>     preparatory PR, Oleg expressed a /dis/interest in being de facto
>     text maintainer, so I am emailing the list in part so this does
>     not fall upon Oleg alone any longer.
>
>     John
>
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