Sven Panne writes:

Just out of curiosity, I've just tried to build and install nhc98 from the darcs repo on an x86_64 Linux platform

So what is the current status on 64bit platforms?

nhc98 does not support 64-bit platforms, it is 32-bit only. However, judging from the fact that I am able to build nhc98 just fine on a 64-bit PowerPC G5, the story is a little more nuanced than that. Apple's gcc is configured to use the 32-bit ABI by default (the -m32 flag). I am guessing that your Linux box has gcc configured with -m64 as the default. So perhaps if you can work out how to pass -m32 to all the C compiler invocations (including those that compile the bytecode output of the nhc98 compiler proper into C arrays)? Unfortunately, ./configure --buildopts="-m32" is not the right thing - it only applies to the bootstrapping Haskell compiler.

Are the problems fixable within a reasonable timeframe?

Of course, using the 32-bit ABI is only a workaround I suppose. Ultimately it should work in native 64-bit mode as well. nhc13 did once support the alpha processor, but that was in the days when it generated assembly code containing the bytecodes, rather than C arrays. Yhc fixes this properly by storing the bytecode in an independent format, and loading it explicitly into memory at runtime. Regards, Malcolm