[nhc-users] nhc98 garbage collection core dumps and build problems

[Malcolm Wallace]

Olaf Chitil <O.Chitil at kent.ac.uk> writes:

> every non-trivial Haskell program compiled with nhc98 (current cvs) core 
> dumps on Solaris.

What compiler are you building with?  Which versions of Solaris and
underlying gcc?  My overnight builds on Solaris 9 with gcc-2.95.2,
ghc-6.2.1 and nhc98 itself all seem to work OK - at least nhc98 is
capable of bootstrapping itself.

> The garbage collector seems to be the cause of the 
> fault. Small computations not requiring garbage collection work fine. 

Hmmm.  GC faults are notoriously difficult to track down.

> With respect to building nhc98 (all). After a long time the process 
> stops with:
> 
> /nfs/myrtle/d23/part1/home/cur/oc/nhc98/script/tprofprel 1 \
> PackedString System CString Driver NonStdEval NonStdProfile NonStdTrace 
> NonStdUnsafeCoerce NonStdGetPID Warning  UnboxedArray BinArray Prelude 
> Array CPUTime Char DErrNo FFI IO IOExtras Ix List Maybe Numeric Random 
> Ratio Bit Binary Locale Observe Complex Directory GreenCard Monad  Time 
> >.../targets/sparc-solaris2/objz/prelude/tpltmp.c
> 
> "$" is not a proper shell prompt. It does accept some input like "gmake 
> install" (without doing anything until interrupted), but it doesn't do 
> anything on input like "ls". I'm confused. In the end I only build "basic".

The beginning of script/tprofprel looks like it does some nasty
sh/bash compatibility stuff, including possibly exec'ing bash.
That might lead to the behaviour you see.

> A minor point: When make tries to build the package haskell-src it calls 
> happy. Because I don't have happy installed this fails. No big problem, 
> because building continues. However, shouldn't configure test for happy, 
> warn about it and possibly exclude haskell-src from building...

Yes, it might be worth adding a check to the configure script.

Regards,
    Malcolm