On 22/11/2012 19:54, Gábor Lehel wrote:
On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 8:41 PM, Henning Thielemann
<lemm...@henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
On Thu, 22 Nov 2012, Brandon Allbery wrote:
I am wondering if we're trying to solve the problem in the wrong way. The
core of the problem is that various things get baked into libraries in the
name of optimization, such that a given binary library has dependencies on
precise versions of other libraries; it's not like C where anything
supporting the ABI can use the same .a/.lib or .so/.dll/.dylib.
C supports inlining. This should cause the same kind of problems, shouldn't
it?
Indeed, and in Qt for example which has a strict binary compatibility
guarantee, making a public function inline means you effectively
cannot change it until the next major release. (In this case "making
it inline" and "including the definition in the header file" are
effectively synonymous, one requires the other.)
The problem is that in Haskell inlining is a lot more important for performance.
I would like to see GHC support fixed ABIs, and the work I did with ABI
hashing in GHC was aiming towards exactly that.
For fixed ABIs you would need to have the user explicitly declare every
inline function, and then hash the definitions as part of the ABI. (also
do something about strictness and arity, and other cross-module
optimisation hints). It might be painful, but it could be optional, and
the gains are quite nice: the ability to upgrade a library in-place
without recompiling everything that depends on it. Especially now that
we're moving towards shared libraries, this would become more useful.
I'm sure it's not going to happen soon, but it would be an interesting
project for someone (probably larger than a GSoC project though).
Cheers,
Simon
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