Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
| Linux Nokia-N810-42-19 2.6.21-omap1 #2 Fri Nov 16 16:24:58 EET 2007
| armv6l unknown
|
| I would love a working GHC implementation on it, if for nothing else
| than how awesome it would be. Whether that means using a C back-end or
| native compilation doesn't matter to me so much.
|
| I might be one to attempt this, as I know C and ARM-ish asm decently
| well and have a powerful desktop to compile on. I have no familiarity
| with GHC internals, though. Lastly, I won't have anything like the time
| to attempt this seriously until mid-September or so.
That's good. John Dias is hard at work on GHC's back end, and we should be in
reasonable shape by mid Sept. Better still a month later... Keep us posted
with what you do.
Simon
Well, I've documented three attempts in detail on the ArmLinuxGhc Trac
page[1]. In short, it doesn't work.
6.8 and 6.9 fail, expectedly, since bootstrapping is known to be
broken[2]. 6.6 might be made to work, but it didn't work with moderate
effort and so it seems foolish to invest that sort of energy into an old
version when the back end is being overhauled.
As it appears that the task will be much easier after the back end
changes, this project is effectively on hold until the 6.10 release. In
particular, bootstrapping needs to work. There is a bug[2] about this
with milestone set to 6.10.1. Hopefully a quick-and-dirty unregisterised
port will be easy after that, with registerised and possibly even
native code-gen on the horizon.
One question that has come up is, what external tools does GHC need to
build binaries on a given platform? When going via-c, is a complete C
toolchain necessary? When doing native code-gen, are ld or ar required,
or other binutils? If we magically had a 6.9 that would generate ARM
binaries, what would it take to run binaries built in the dev
environment on the device? Would it take more to run GHC itself on the
device?
Braden Shepherdson
shepheb
[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ArmLinuxGhc
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1346
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
