October 2018 - ghc-devs

The future of Phabricator
by Ben Gamari 19 Sep '21

19 Sep '21

TL;DR. For several reasons I think we should consider alternatives to Phabricator. My view is that GitLab seems like the best option. Hello everyone, Over the past year I have been growing increasingly weary of our continued dependence on Phabricator. Without a doubt, its code review interface is the best I have used. However, for a myriad of reasons I am recently questioning whether it is still the best tool for GHC's needs. # The problem There are a number of reasons why I am currently uncertain about Phabricator. For one, at this point we have no options for support in the event that something goes wrong as the company responsible for Phabricator, Phacility, has closed their support channels to non-paying customers. Furthermore, in the past year or two Phacility has been placing their development resources in the parts their customers pay them for, which appear to be much different that the parts that we actively use. For this reason, some parts that we rely on seem oddly half-finished. This concern was recently underscored by some rather unfortunate misfeatures in Harbormaster which resulted in broken CI after the Hadrian merge and now apparent bugs which have made it difficult to migrate to the CircleCI integration we previously prepared. Perhaps most importantly, in our recent development priorities survey our use of Phabricator was the most common complaint by a fair margin, both in case of respondents who have contributed patches and those who have not. On the whole, past contributors and potential future contributors alike have strongly indicated that they want a more Git-like experience. Of course, this wasn't terribly surprising; this is just the most recent case where contributors have made this preference known. Frankly, in a sense it is hard to blame them. The fact that users need to install a PHP tool, Arcanist, to contribute anything but documentation patches has always seemed like unnecessary friction to me and I would be quite happy to be rid of it. Indeed we have had a quite healthy number of GitHub documentation patches since we started accepting them. This makes me thing that there may indeed be potential contributoes that we are leaving on the table. # What to do With Rackspace support ending at the end of year, now may be a good time to consider whether we really want to continue on this road. Phabricator is great at code review but I am less and less certain that it is worth the maintenance uncertainty and potential lost contributors that it costs. Moreover, good alternatives seem closer at-hand than they were when we deployed Phabricator. ## Move to GitHub When people complain about our infrastructure, they often use GitHub as the example of what they would like to see. However, realistically I have a hard time seeing GitHub as a viable option. Its feature set is simply insufficient enough to handle the needs of a larger project like GHC without significant external tooling (as seen in the case of Rust-lang). The concrete reasons have been well-documented in previous discussions but, to summarize, * its review functionality is extremely painful to use with larger patches * rebased patches lead to extreme confusion and lost review comments * it lacks support for pre-receive hooks, which serve as a last line of defense to prevent unintended submodule changes * its inability to deal with external tickets is problematic * there is essentially no possibility that we could eventually migrate GHC's tickets to GitHub's ticket tracker without considerable data loss (much less manage the ticket load that would result), meaning that we would forever be stuck with maintaining Trac. * on a personal note, its search functionality has often left me empty-handed On the whole, these issues seem pretty hard to surmount. ## Move to GitLab In using GitLab for another project over the past months I have been positively surprised by its quality. It handles rebased merge requests far better than GitHub, has functional search, and quite a usable review interface. Furthermore, upstream has been extremely responsive to suggestions for improvement [1]. Even out-of-the-box it seems to be flexible enough to accommodate our needs, supporting integration with external issue trackers, having reasonable release management features, and support for code owners to automate review triaging (replacing much of the functionality of Phabricator's Herald). Finally, other FOSS projects' [3] recent migrations from Phabrictor to GitLab have shown that GitLab-the-company is quite willing to offer help when needed. I took some time this weekend to try setting up a quick GHC instance [2] to play around with. Even after just a few hours of playing around I think the result is surprisingly usable. Out of curiosity I also played around with importing some tickets from Trac (building on Matt Pickering's Trac-to-Maniphest migration tool). With relatively little effort I was even able to get nearly all of our tickets (as of 9 months ago) imported while preserving ticket numbers (although there are naturally a few wrinkles that would need to be worked out). Naturally, I think we should treat the question of ticket tracker migration as an orthogonal one to code review, but it is good to know that this is possible. ## Continue with Phabricator Continuing with Phabricator is of course an option. Its review functionality is great and it has served us reasonably well. However, compared to GitLab and even GitHub of today its features seem less distinguished than they once did. Moreover, the prospect of having to maintain a largely stagnant product with no support strikes me as a slightly dangerous game to play. Working around the issues we have recently encountered has already cost a non-negligible amount of time. # The bottom line If it wasn't clear already, I think that we should strongly consider a move to GitLab. At this point it seems clear that it isn't going to vanish, has a steady pace of development, is featureful, and available. However, these are just my thoughts. What do you think? Cheers, - Ben [1] 11.4 will ship with a file tree view in the code review interface, which I reported (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46474) as being is one of the Phabricator features I missed the most during review [2] https://gitlab.home.smart-cactus.org/ghc/ghc/issues/14641 [3] The GNOME and freedesktop.org projects have recently migrated, the former from a hodge-podge of self-hosted services and the latter from Phabricator

17 40

GHC's module hierarchy
by Simon Peyton Jones 03 Oct '19

03 Oct '19

Dear ghc-devs hsyl20 proposes a radical overhaul of the module structure of GHC itself. He or she suggested it six months ago in https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/13009 and has now offered a monster patch https://phabricator.haskell.org/D3647 It's clearly the result of a lot of work, but I was the only one who responded on the original ticket, and it'll affect all of your lives in a very immediate way. So, would you like to * consider the idea * look at the actual re-mapping of modules hsyl20 proposals * express an opinion about whether to go ahead Probably the ticket, rather than Phab, is the best place to comment on the general idea. I'd like to thank hsyl20. GHC's rather flat module structure has grown incrementally over years. But still, there are pros and cons. Simon

2 1

Any ways to test a GHC build against large set of packages (including test suites)?
by Ömer Sinan Ağacan 26 Jul '19

26 Jul '19

Hi, I'd like to test some GHC builds + some compile and runtime flag combinations against a large set of packages by building them and running test suites. For this I need - A set of packages that are known to work with latest GHC - A way to build them and run their test suites (if I could specify compile and runtime flags that'd be even better) I think stackage can serve as (1) but I don't know how to do (2). Can anyone point me to the right direction? I vaguely remember some nix-based solution for this that was being discussed on the IRC channel, but can't recall any details. Thanks, Ömer

9 15

Default options for -threaded
by lonetiger＠gmail.com 04 Jan '19

04 Jan '19

Hi All, A user on https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/11054 has asked why -N -qa isn’t the default for -threaded. I’m afraid I don’t know a good reason why it’s not. Can anyone help shed some light on this? If there is no good reason, Would anyone object to making it the default? Thanks, Tamar

7 10

Re: [Haskell] Treatment of unknown pragmas
by Artem Pelenitsyn 03 Dec '18

03 Dec '18

Hello Daniel, Annotations API was discussed earlier in this thread. Main points against are: Neil: Significant compilation performance penalty and extra recompilation. ANN pragmas is what HLint currently uses. Brandon: The problem with ANN is it's part of the plugins API, and as such does things like compiling the expression into the program in case a plugin generates code using its value, plus things like recompilation checking end up assuming plugins are in use and doing extra checking. Using it as a compile-time pragma is actually fairly weird from that standpoint. -- Best, Artem On Sat, 27 Oct 2018 at 22:12 Daniel Wagner <dmwit(a)dmwit.com> wrote: > I don't have a really strong opinion, but... isn't this (attaching > string-y data to source constructs) pretty much exactly what GHC's > annotation pragma is for? > ~d > > On Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 3:14 PM Ben Gamari <ben(a)smart-cactus.org> wrote: > >> Vladislav Zavialov <vlad.z.4096(a)gmail.com> writes: >> >> > What about introducing -fno-warn-pragma=XXX? People who use HLint will >> > add -fno-warn-pragma=HLINT to their build configuration. >> > >> A warning flag is an interesting way to deal with the issue. On the >> other hand, it's not great from an ergonomic perspective; afterall, this >> would mean that all users of HLint (and any other tool requiring special >> pragmas) include this flag in their build configuration. A typical >> Haskell project already needs too much such boilerplate, in my opinion. >> >> I think it makes a lot of sense to have a standard way for third-parties >> to attach string-y information to Haskell source constructs. While it's >> not strictly speaking necessary to standardize the syntax, doing >> so minimizes the chance that tools overlap and hopefully reduces >> the language ecosystem learning curve. >> >> Cheers, >> >> - Ben >> _______________________________________________ >> > Haskell mailing list >> Haskell(a)haskell.org >> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell >> > _______________________________________________ > Haskell mailing list > Haskell(a)haskell.org > http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell >

2 1

perf.haskell.org functional again
by Joachim Breitner 30 Nov '18

30 Nov '18

Hi, after a system upgrade to avoid weird linker errors, and after some fixes in the nofib submodule, http://perf.haskell.org/ghc is running again. I am collecting instruction counts instead of runtime, because the latter was just too often varying too wildly. I hope this will yield less false alarms. I am also running nofib with mode=fast. This way, building GHC, running the testsuite and nofib takes a bit over one hour. I hope this can keep up with y'all's commits (when it took 2h it couldn't). Now nothing of the setup requires a quiet dedicated machine, so if there is a need, we could move these builds into the cloud or into some CI infrastructure - but no changes are immediately planned. Enjoy, Joachim

5 11

slow execution of built executables on a Mac
by Richard Eisenberg 14 Nov '18

14 Nov '18

Hi devs, I have a shiny, new iMac in my office. It's thus frustrating that it takes my iMac longer to build GHC than my trusty 28-month-old laptop. Building devel2 on a fresh checkout takes just about an hour. By contrast, my laptop is done after 30 minutes of work (same build settings). The laptop has a 2.8GHz Intel i7 running macOS 10.13.5; the desktop has a 3.5GHz Intel i5 running macOS 10.13.6. Both bootstrapped from the binary distro of GHC 8.6.1. Watching GHC build, everything is snappy enough during the stage-1 build. But then, as soon as we start using GHC-produced executables, things slow down. It's most noticeable in the rts_dist_HC phase, which crawls. Stage 2 is pretty slow, too. So: is there anything anyone knows about recent Macs not liking locally built executables? Or is there some local setting that I need to update? The prepackaged GHC seems to work well, so that gives me hope that someone knows what setting to tweak. Thanks! Richard

6 11

GHC's Fall 2018 HCAR submission
by Ben Gamari 12 Nov '18

12 Nov '18

Hello everyone, The Haskell Community Activities Report is coming up and I have prepared the skeleton for GHC's contribution [1]. If you have a project cooking or have recently had a patch land do have a look to make sure it's recognized in the submission. Cheers, - Ben https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/Oct18

6 10

Re: Suppressing False Incomplete Pattern Matching Warnings for Polymorphic Pattern Synonyms
by Ryan Scott 10 Nov '18

10 Nov '18

You *can* put `LL` into a COMPLETE set, but under the stipulation that you specify which type constructor it's monomorphized to. To quote the wiki page on COMPLETE sets: In the case where all the patterns are polymorphic, a user must provide a type signature but we accept the definition regardless of the type signature they provide. The type constructor for the whole set of patterns is the type constructor as specified by the user. If the user does not provide a type signature then the definition is rejected as ambiguous. This design is a consequence of the design of the pattern match checker. Complete sets of patterns must be identified relative to a type. This is a sanity check as users would never be able to match on all constructors if the set of patterns is inconsistent in this manner. In other words, this would work provided that you'd be willing to list every single instance of `HasSrcSpan` in its own COMPLETE set. It's tedious, but possible. Ryan S. ----- [1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/PatternSynonyms/CompleteSigs#Typing

5 9

GHC 8.8 freeze in three weeks
by Ben Gamari 06 Nov '18

06 Nov '18

Hello everyone, Incredibly enough we are quickly coming up on three months since the nominal GHC 8.6.1 release date. This means that the GHC 8.8 branch is quickly approaching. We will plan on cutting the branch on November 18th. Note that this is in three weeks. If you have a patch that you would like to see in GHC 8.8 and it isn't yet up on Phabricator, do let me know. Moreover, if you have something that will be in GHC 8.8 and you haven't yet added it to the release status page [1], please add it. Cheers, - Ben [1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-8.8.1

2 2