On Sun, 1 Apr 2007 02:28:33 +0100 "Claus Reinke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> But then I looked into the repository, with its layers on layers of > build systems, source formats, deprecation warnings, directory > structure fragments, todo logs, broken builds resulting either from > OS-tools advancing and playing havoc with the built-in assumptions > of fragile build configurations or from multiple, partially > completed, mutually incompatible heart-liver-and-lung transplants > supporting the newest language extensions (which of course were all > needed to build the compiler branch supporting said features, and > whose documentation tended to be spread over user manual, API > comments, mailing list threads, research papers, plus half a dozen > different Wikis and ticket trackers), supported by often outdated > documentation in a never-ending variety of formats, and I knew I had > stumbled onto a goldmine. I hate to say this, but the build process for GHC is one place where the Ocaml guys have us soundly beaten. A little over a month ago, I was in the position of having to build a parallel simulation to run on a cluster, and I had a week to do it. The problem was, I didn't know what cluster I'd be on when I started it. Itanium? Opteron? HP-UX? Linux? IRIX? I wanted to use a functional language, just for the sake of my own productivity. I chose Objective Caml because its compiler system feels easier to build. It built on every cluster I tried. I had enough trouble trying to get GHC to build on Mac OS X back in the 6.4 days. I'm not in a position to say this for certain, but GHC seems more complex than the Ocaml toolset. I would love it if GHC ran magically out of the box on any platform. If I could download a simple src tarball and compile it brazenly on whatever system I end up on. If I could take GHC with me anywhere. One thing that feels like a step in the right direction is the native codegen. Not having to trust a generalized, but still evil, perl script to do its job correctly in concert with whatever local c compiler is a good thing. I had nagging fears of my project dying with 6 hours to the deadline because HP's software engineers made a small change to gcc that generates minutely different function epilogues in 1% of cases and made the mangler, well, mangle. GHC wants to be free! Matthew Cox _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
