[Yhc] Compiling Yhc - n00b having trouble

[Ashley Moran]

On Jul 14, 2008, at 11:21 am, Neil Mitchell wrote:

> Unfortunately Yhc is not that well maintained or usable - the GHC
> compiler is a lot more robust. If you want to work through something
> like YAHT with two compilers, I'd recommend Hugs and GHC.

Hi Neil

I was under the impression that the Yhc was still being developed,  
although the repo has no patches for the last few months.  What's its  
likely future?

The reason I was looking at Yhc is that in the long run (aka when I  
get time) I'd like to learn more about compilers and virtual  
machines.  So I'm using GHC to learn Haskell because I know it will  
work, but my interest was in Yhc as project  rather than just a  
Haskell compiler.  Yhc looks a lot more approachable (I think GHC is  
something like 100kloc?) and there's already some work done to make it  
compile to other environments, so I figured it'd be more fun to hack.

Would Yhc be suitable for my learning purposes or could you recommend  
something else?


>>> darcs failed:  Failed to download URL
>>> http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/yhc/dependencies/cpphs/_darcs/patches/20051220141353-ff520-d48804240ec68476275dfaa298201210361fcaee.gz 
>>> :
>
> Weird. I will check this one out - sounds very suspicious.

Looks like the patch file is just plain missing.


>>> scons: *** Source `depends/ctypes/libffi/src/x86/ffi_darwin.c' not  
>>> found,
>>> needed by target `depends/ctypes/libffi/src/x86/ffi_darwin.o'.   
>>> Stop.
>>> scons: building terminated because of errors.
>
> It looks like you are building on Mac, which I know people have had
> difficulty with in the past. I'm not sure if anyone has figured it out
> yet?

Yeah - I'm using OS X 10.5.  I could try it in a FreeBSD or Linux VM,  
although if the cpphs repo is unavailable I don't suppose I'd have  
much luck.

Incidentally I did try replacing the cpphs darcs repo with an unpacked  
tarball source[1], but that doesn't help.  It's also interesting to  
note that cpphs (version 1.3) is in MacPorts and compiles fine.  I  
haven't looked at it further, I simply carried on working with GHC  
alone.


Cheers
Ashley


[1] http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/cpphs/#download


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