| What progress on the Great Hugs Collaboration? That is,
| being able to run
| Hugs bytecode inside GHC or GHC compiled code inside Hugs. I
| don't expect much detail but if the marriage is expected Real Soon Now, or
| alternatively has been postponed indefinitely, I would like to know!
An entirely reasonable question. Here's the state of affairs
(at least as I understand it).
* The GHC hackers here at MSR Cambridge, and the Hugs team at OGI
remain committed to the Great Marriage.
* We have running a new version of Hugs (currently dubbed "STG Hugs")
that sits on top of the new, joint runtime system. GHC 4.04 also
stits on top of the very same runtime system. STG Hugs does just
about all that Hugs 98 does; a current task is to update it with
the recent Hugs 98 bugfixes.
* STG Hugs can load some very simple GHC-compiled binaries. But
we havn't yet lined up the representation of dictionaries, so
overloading doesn't work. That's the next task. So we're quite
close to being able to inter-work. But not there.
* We also have a plan for how to modularise STG Hugs so that it
consists of a re-useable C library called the Haskell Execution
Platform (HEP), plus a number of "clients". Examples of clients are:
- the normal Hugs textual interface
- an updated version of WinHugs (any volunteers?)
- a "scripting engine", that can Haskell-enable a web browser
- a "haskell server" that enables you to wrap up Haskell source
code as a COM object
- and maybe more besides.
The draft spec for the HEP is at
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/papers/hep.ps.gz
* STG Hugs will in due course become *the* Hugs. It's in the
same CVS repository as GHC, and anyone can get at it, right now
if you want.
The big question is: when will we progress the marriage? Here the
news is not so good. We have something of an effort crisis. We plan
to put out the first STG Hugs, with the same FFI as GHC, but without
the ability to mix GHC-compiled and interpreted modules, in the next
month or so. Then we hope to put out STG Hugs that *does* run GHC-compiled
binaries end Feb '00. That's much longer away than we would like, but
there it is.
Anyone who would like to lend a hand, especially with the HEP
modularisation, would be very welcome to join in.
Simon
