July 2014 - ghc-devs - Haskell.org

old-time.git/tests/time004.hs is DST-sensitive :-/
by Herbert Valerio Riedel 26 Oct '14

26 Oct '14

Hi *, if anyone wonders, why TEST=time004 suddenly fails: it's sensitive to DST (and depends on your system's TZ-config): http://git.haskell.org/packages/old-time.git/blob/HEAD:/tests/time004.hs For me, the comparison this unit-test checks now suddenly fails, because the DST-switch occurs on different days in 2012 and 2013 in my TZ, i.e. length "Sun Oct 27 10:56:42 CET 2013" /= length "Sat Oct 27 11:56:42 CEST 2012" Does anyone happen to know what the rationale behind this 'time004' unit test was? Cheers, hvr

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FFI: c/c++ struct on stack as an argument or return value
by Yuras Shumovich 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

Hi, Right now ghc's FFI doesn't support c/c++ structures. Whenever we have foreign function that accepts or returns struct by value, we have to create wrapper that accepts or returns pointer to struct. It is inconvenient, but actually not a big deal. But there is no easy workaround when you want to export haskell function to use it with c/c++ API that requires structures to be passed by value (Usually it is a callback in c/c++ API. You can't change it's signature, and if it doesn't provide some kind of "void* userdata", then you are stuck.) I'm interested in fixing that. I'm going to start with 'foreign import "wrapper" ...' stuff. Calling conventions for passing c/c++ structures by value are pretty tricky and platform/compiler specific. So initially I'll use libffi for that (it will work when USE_LIBFFI_FOR_ADJUSTORS is defined, see rts/Adjustor.c). It will allow me to explore design space without bothering about low level implementation details. Later it could be implemented for native (non-libffi) adjustors. Is anybody interested it that? I appreciate any comments/ideas. Right now I don't have clear design. It would be nice to support plain haskell data types that are 1) not recursive, 2) has one constructor and 3) contains only c/c++ types. But it doesn't work with c/c++ unions. Any ideas are welcome. An example how to use libffi with structures: http://www.atmark-techno.com/~yashi/libffi.html#Structures Thanks, Yuras

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Extending fold/build fusion
by Akio Takano 05 Sep '14

05 Sep '14

Hi, I have been thinking about how foldl' can be turned into a good consumer, and I came up with something that I thought would work. So I'd like to ask for opinions from the ghc devs: if this idea looks good, if it is a known bad idea, if there is a better way to do it, etc. The main idea is to have an extended version of foldr: -- | A mapping between @a@ and @b@. data Wrap a b = Wrap (a -> b) (b -> a) foldrW :: (forall e. Wrap (f e) (e -> b -> b)) -> (a -> b -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b foldrW (Wrap wrap unwrap) f z0 list0 = wrap go list0 z0 where go = unwrap $ \list z' -> case list of [] -> z' x:xs -> f x $ wrap go xs z' This allows the user to apply an arbitrary "worker-wrapper" transformation to the loop. Using this, foldl' can be defined as newtype Simple b e = Simple { runSimple :: e -> b -> b } foldl' :: (b -> a -> b) -> b -> [a] -> b foldl' f initial xs = foldrW (Wrap wrap unwrap) g id xs initial where wrap (Simple s) e k a = k $ s e a unwrap u = Simple $ \e -> u e id g x next acc = next $! f acc x The wrap and unwrap functions here ensure that foldl' gets compiled into a loop that returns a value of 'b', rather than a function 'b -> b', effectively un-CPS-transforming the loop. I put preliminary code and some more explanation on Github: https://github.com/takano-akio/ww-fusion Thank you, Takano Akio

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Proposal: run GHC API tests on fast
by Edward Z. Yang 02 Sep '14

02 Sep '14

Currently, most GHC API tests are not run on 'make fast', ostensibly because linking against the GHC API can take a while. I propose that change this, and run GHC API tests by default. Reasons: 1. The GHC API is closely tied a lot of internal structure of GHC, so it's very easy to make a change, track it through the rest of the compiler, but forget to update the tests/documentation. 2. We can boost this into poor man's testable documentation. The idea is to duplicate all GHC API examples in the manual in the test suite, and have a comment on all of the examples asking the developer to update the manual. (Or we could automatically extract the snippets from the manual, but that's work and this I could do in a few minutes.) 3. I don't think running these tests will add that much extra run time to the test suite; certainly interactively the time spent linking is unnoticeable. Let's set a one week discussion period for this proposal. Thanks, Edward

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Re: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: GHC version 7.8.3
by Bryan O'Sullivan 02 Sep '14

02 Sep '14

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 6:40 AM, Austin Seipp <austin(a)well-typed.com> wrote: > The GHC Team is pleased to announce a new patchlevel release of GHC, 7.8.3. > haddock 2.14.3 that ships with it seems to be quite broken. Perhaps it's a bad interaction with cabal, it's hard to say from the outside, but here are some details. Here's the kind of error I get from haddock when I try to use cabal to install a package (primitive, in this case): module ‘primitive-0.5.3.0:Main’ is defined in multiple files: dist/build/tmp-92638/Control/Monad/Primitive.hs dist/build/tmp-92638/Data/Primitive/MachDeps.hs dist/build/tmp-92638/Data/Primitive/Types.hs dist/build/tmp-92638/Data/Primitive/Array.hs dist/build/tmp-92638/Data/Primitive/ByteArray.hs dist/build/tmp-92638/Data/Primitive/Internal/Compat.hs The result is that I have no haddock docs for any packages now :-(

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Can't install 32-bit ghc-7.8.1 on 64-bit xubuntu 14.04
by kyra 30 Aug '14

30 Aug '14

Hi, I have unpacked ghc-7.8.1-i386-unknown-linux-deb7.tar.xz to ~/data/Work/ghc-7.8.1-i386. Now I have the following: awson@awsonvirt:~/data/Work/ghc-7.8.1-i386$ ./configure --prefix=/home/awson/data/ghc-7.8.1-i386 checking for path to top of build tree... utils/ghc-pwd/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-pwd-bindist: line 3: /home/awson/data/Work/ghc-7.8.1-i386/utils/ghc-pwd/dist-install/build/tmp/ghc-pwd: No such file or directory configure: error: cannot determine current directory ghc-pwd is definitely there but it does not start it seems. Perhaps, the system lacks some shared libs or something. There absolutely no problems with 64-bit ghc. Regards, Kyra

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Broken Data.Data instances
by p.k.f.holzenspies＠utwente.nl 15 Aug '14

15 Aug '14

Dear GHC-ers, Is there a reason for explicitly broken Data.Data instances? Case in point: > instance Data Var where > -- don't traverse? > toConstr _ = abstractConstr "Var" > gunfold _ _ = error "gunfold" > dataTypeOf _ = mkNoRepType "Var" I understand (vaguely) arguments about abstract data types, but this also excludes convenient queries that can, e.g. extract all types from a CoreExpr. I had hoped to do stuff like this: > collect :: (Typeable b, Data a, MonadPlus m) => a -> m b > collect = everything mplus $ mkQ mzero return > > allTypes :: CoreExpr -> [Type] > allTypes = collect Especially when still exploring (parts of) the GHC API, being able to extract things in this fashion is very helpful. SYB's "everything" being broken by these instances, not so much. Would a patch "fixing" these instances be acceptable? Regards, Philip

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ARM64 Task Force
by Luke Iannini 13 Aug '14

13 Aug '14

Howdy all, Would anyone like to team up on getting ARM64 support into GHC? Cheers Luke

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Building GHC under Wine?
by Joachim Breitner 08 Aug '14

08 Aug '14

Hi, I feel sorry for Simon always repeatedly stuck with an unbuildable tree, and an idea crossed my mind: Can we build¹ GHC under Wine? If so, is it likely to catch the kind of problems that Simon is getting? If so, maybe it runs fast enough to be also tested by travis on every commit? (This mail is to find out if people have tried it before. If not, I’ll give it a quick shot.) Greetings, Joachim ¹ we surely can use it: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC_under_Wine -- Joachim “nomeata” Breitner mail(a)joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ Jabber: nomeata(a)joachim-breitner.de • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F Debian Developer: nomeata(a)debian.org

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Interrupt interruptible foreign calls on HS exit
by Andreas Voellmy 05 Aug '14

05 Aug '14

Hi GHCers, I've been looking into issue #9284, which boils down to getting certain foreign calls issued by HS threads to finish (i.e. return) in the exit sequence of forkProcess. There are several options for solving the particular problem in #9284; one option is to issue the particular foreign calls causing that issue as "interruptible" and then have the exit sequence interrupt interruptible foreign calls. The exit sequence, starting from hs_exit(), goes through hs_exit_(), exitScheduler(), scheduleDoGC(), deleteAllThreads(), and then deleteThread(), where deleteThread is this: static void deleteThread (Capability *cap STG_UNUSED, StgTSO *tso) { // NOTE: must only be called on a TSO that we have exclusive // access to, because we will call throwToSingleThreaded() below. // The TSO must be on the run queue of the Capability we own, or // we must own all Capabilities. if (tso->why_blocked != BlockedOnCCall && tso->why_blocked != BlockedOnCCall_Interruptible) { throwToSingleThreaded(tso->cap,tso,NULL); } } So it looks like interruptible foreign calls are not interrupted in the exit sequence. Is there a good reason why we have this behavior? Could we change it to interrupt TSO's with why_blocked == BlockedOnCCall_Interruptible in the exit sequence? Thanks, Andi P.S. It looks like this was introduced in commit 83d563cb9ede0ba792836e529b1e2929db926355.

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