| For those of us who're not following the cvs archive, could the
| maintainers give us a brief summary of recent progress on the ghc-hugs
| "marriage" and other recent ghc work?
A fair question. Here's a (GHC-centric) summary of the state of play.
* Julian is away this week, but he has just emerged from the final
major chunk of work (re-engineering Hugs's module-loading engine)
required to enable Hugs to load GHC-compiled binaries. He's had some
examples working. The plan is to release the first version that will do
this before the end of April. We think we are out of major code development
and into make-it-work. So I expect progress to be more visible from now on.
* Andy has been doing heroic work making more and more of hslibs/, the
libraries that GHC comes with, work with STG-Hugs too. So the end-April
release should feature a much larger set of common libraries.
* Stephen Jarvis spent six weeks here on a mini-sabbatical recently. He has
a lovely profile browser that lets you walk over call-graphs built from a
log file
that GHC can now dump, thanks to Simon Marlow's good offices.
This gives you a much much richer picture of
the hot-spots in your program than hitherto. He's working on the
space-profiling
side too. He will soon put his browser into the CVS repository. Quite
when all
this will be ready for use I'm not quite sure -- it depends a lot on Stephen
-- but
think a month or two not a year or two.
* Reuben is becoming Mr Windows. The order of battle is
a) Make GHC build smoothly on Win2k
b) Make it so we can easily produce Installshield releases
c) Make it so that you don't need Cygwin to *use* GHC
(you'll always need Cygwin to *build* GHC from source)
At the moment (a) is almost done; (b) looks relatively simple, and (c) is a
bit of an unknown.
* Julian was struck by a sudden and irresistable urge to dive into GHC's
native code generator,
which has been moribund for some while. (The NCG is intended to generate
reasonable code, but generate it fast; the via-C route generates better
code, but
much slower.) As a result of this surge of hormones, the x86 NCG is working
all but
one dark corner. The Sparc, MIPS etc generators are not done. Any takers?
It would
be much easier now the framework (including much machine-independent code
gen) is
done. We hope that the next release of GHC will have at least the x86 NCG
fully working.
* Simon, Andy Moran and I have worked out a nice story about *asynchronous*
exceptions
in Concurrent Haskell. Simon has implemented it, and tried it out by
writing a Web server
in Haskell. It's all rather nice even though I say it myself. The paper
is on my home page.
* Simon and I have been in maintenance mode. Simon has fixed more bugs than
I care
to tell you about. I've simplified the Core data type a big further (no
saturated
constructor applications any more).
* Ralf Hinze visited. We plan to implement his 'generic functions' in
Haskell. The
way we plan to do this is to make the 'default declarations' in class
declaration
much more expressive. In particular, we should be able to express what
'deriving'
means using these generic declarations, and thereby make it possible for the
programmer
to do 'deriving' for any class of his/her own. (As the Derive tool does,
but more integrated
into the language.) Andrei Serjantov, who'll be here for a few months from
May, will
do the implementation work.
* Sven Panne and Manuel Chakravarty are busy on a substantial FFI library
that should
make it easier to write code that interfaces with other languages.
As ever, we are extremely open to other people joining in and doing stuff.
GHC and Hugs are both completely open-source, and you can easily get access
to the current version via CVS. Please join in!
Simon
