[Yhc] Killing off nhc

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> That you mention this *now* implies that Malcolm is having issues with
> libgmp as well as libffi, which means that (per your plan mentioned on
> IRC yesterday) Malcolm will get 32 bit Integers.  Why didn't he have
> this problem with nhc?

Libraries, build system, makefile vs scons - its not incredibly well
understood. Malcolms machine is also not able to become a buildbot
(its behind a firewall) and is a 64 bit Mac (I think) - if someone
could provide us with such a buildbot we'd have a better chance at
diagnosing it.

> > 3) Libraries: We need to move to the Haskell.org libraries. This may
> > mean increasing our build stuff, or moving to Cabal.
>
> Increasing our build stuff, maybe not; I'm a strong opponent of GHC's
> extralibs :)

I mean our build infrastructure, not building more libraries by
default necessarily - just allowing it to be done.

> Supporting Cabal is an absolute must if we want to take over any sizable
> chunk of the Haskell implementation's market; for implementation I
> recommend <http://haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2007-May/007507.html>.

Waiting for Cabal improvements may slow things down a lot. Cabal is
obviously a very nice way to go, but may require lots of hacking to
Cabal - which isn't the worlds nicest code base. If someone stepped
forward saying that really like hacking Cabal and wanted to use Yhc as
a case study that would be great!

> It might be an issue, that yhc unlike nhc cannot generate executables.
> We should look at what Hugs' cabal support uses.

I don't think so, unlikely Hugs we can generate something that's
nearly an executable, and we can go closer (bytecode linking) if
necessary.

Thanks

Neil