October 2020 - ghc-devs

The future of Phabricator
by Ben Gamari 18 Sep '21

18 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

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New implementation for `ImpredicativeTypes`
by Alejandro Serrano Mena 08 Sep '21

08 Sep '21

Hi all, As I mentioned some time ago, we have been busy working on a new implementation of `ImpredicativeTypes` for GHC. I am very thankful to everybody who back then sent us examples of impredicativity which would be nice to support, as far as we know this branch supports all of them! :) If you want to try it, at https://gitlab.haskell.org/trupill/ghc/commit/a3f95a0fe0f647702fd7225fa719a… you can find the result of the pipeline, which includes builds for several platforms (click on the "Artifacts" button, the one which looks like a cloud, to get them). The code is being developed at https://gitlab.haskell.org/trupill/ghc. Any code should run *unchanged* except for some eta-expansion required for some specific usage patterns of higher-rank types. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions or clarifications about it. A merge request for tracking this can be found at https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/merge_requests/1659 Kind regards, Alejandro

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Fat interface files?
by Ben Gamari 21 Dec '20

21 Dec '20

Hi Edward, While chatting with the ghc-ide folks recently I realized that it would be useful to be able to preserve Core such that compilation can be restarted (e.g. to be pushed down the bytecode pipeline to evaluate TH splices). As I recall this is precisely what you implemented in your "fat interface file" work. Do you recall what the state of this work was? Do you have a branch with last-known-good work? Do you recall any tricky questions that remained outstanding? Cheers, - Ben

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[ANNOUNCE] Glasgow Haskell Compiler 9.0.1-alpha1 released
by Ben Gamari 06 Dec '20

06 Dec '20

Hello all, The GHC team is very pleased to announce the availability of the first alpha release in the GHC 9.0 series. Source and binary distributions are available at the usual place: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.0.1-alpha1/ This first alpha comes quite a bit later than expected. However, we have done a significant amount of testing on this pre-release and therefore hope to be able to move forward quickly with a release candidate next week and with a final release in mid-October. GHC 9.0.1 will bring a number of new features: * A first cut of the new LinearTypes language extension [1], allowing use of linear function syntax and linear record fields. * A new bignum library (ghc-bignum), allowing GHC to be more easily used with integer libraries other than GMP. * Improvements in code generation, resulting in considerable performance improvements in some programs. * Improvements in pattern-match checking, allowing more precise detection of redundant cases and reduced compilation time. * Implementation of the "simplified subsumption" proposal [2] simplifying the type system and paving the way for QuickLook impredicativity in GHC 9.2. * Implementation of the QualifiedDo extension [3], allowing more convenient overloading of `do` syntax. * Improvements in compilation time. And many more. See the release notes [4] for a full accounting of the changes in this release. Do note that there are a few things that we expect will change before the final release: * We expect to sort out a notarization workflow for Apple Darwin, allowing our binary distributions to be used on macOS Catalina without hassle. Until this has been sorted out Catalina users can exempt the current macOS binary distribution from the notarization requirement themselves by running `xattr -cr .` on the unpacked tree before running `make install`. * We will likely transition the Alpine binary distribution to be fully statically-linked, providing a convenient, distribution-independent packaging option for Linux users. * We will be merging a robust solution for #17760 which will introduce a new primitive, `keepAlive#`, to the `base` library, subsuming most uses of `touch#`. As always, do test this release and open tickets for whatever issues you encounter. To help with this, we will be publishing a blog post describing use of our new `head.hackage` infrastructure to ease testing of larger projects with Hackage dependencies later this week. Cheers, - Ben [1] https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0111-l… [2] https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0287-s… [3] https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0216-q… [4] https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.0.1-alpha1/docs/html/users_guide/9.0.1-…

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Using a development snapshot of happy
by Vladislav Zavialov 04 Dec '20

04 Dec '20

Hi ghc-devs, I’m working on the unification of parsers for terms and types, and one of the things I’d really like to make use of is a feature I implemented in ‘happy’ in October 2019 (9 months ago): https://github.com/simonmar/happy/pull/153 It’s been merged upstream, but there has been no release of ‘happy’, despite repeated requests: 1. I asked for a release in December: https://github.com/simonmar/happy/issues/164 2. Ben asked for a release a month ago: https://github.com/simonmar/happy/issues/168 I see two solutions here: a) Find a co-maintainer for ‘happy’ who could make releases more frequently (I understand the current maintainers probably don’t have the time to do it). b) Use a development snapshot of ‘happy’ in GHC Maybe we need to do both, but one reason I’d like to see (b) in particular happen is that I can imagine introducing more features to ‘happy’ for use in GHC, and it’d be nice not to wait for a release every time. For instance, there are some changes I’d like to make to happy/alex in order to implement #17750 So here are two questions I have: 1. Are there any objections to this idea? 2. If not, could someone more familiar with the build process guide me as to how this should be implemented? Do I add ‘happy’ as a submodule and change something in the ./configure script, or is there more to it? Do I need to modify make/hadrian, and if so, then how? Thanks, - Vlad

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GitLab down
by Ben Gamari 26 Oct '20

26 Oct '20

Hi all, GitLab will be down for a bit while I do a bit of maintenance. Cheers, - Ben

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GHC's internal confusion about Ints and Words
by Moritz Angermann 22 Oct '20

22 Oct '20

Hi there! So there is a procedure calling convention that for reasons I did not fully understand, but seem to be historically grown, uses packed arguments for those that are spilled onto the stack. On top of that, CInt is 32bit, Word is 64bits. This provides the following spectacle: While we know in STG that the CInt is 32bits wide, when lowered into Cmm, it's represented as I64 in the arguments to the C function. Thus packing based on the format of the Cmm type would yield 8 bytes. And now, all further packed arguments have the wrong offset (by four). Specifically in GHC.Cmm.Utils we find: primRepCmmType :: Platform -> PrimRep -> CmmType primRepCmmType platform IntRep = bWord platform mkIntCLit :: Platform -> Int -> CmmLit mkIntCLit platform i = CmmInt (toInteger i) (wordWidth platform) The naive idea to just fix this and make them return cIntWidth instead, seemingly produces the correct Cmm expressions at a local level, but produces a broken compiler. A second approach could be to extend the Hints into providing sizes, and using those during the foreign call generation to pack spilled arguments. This however appears to be more of a patching up of some fundamental underlying issue, instead of rectifying it properly. Maybe I'll have to go down the Hint path, it does however break current Eq assumptions, as they are sized now, and what was equal before, is only equal now if they represent the same size. >From a cursory glance at the issues with naively fixing the width for Int, it seems that GHC internally assumes sizeof(Int) = sizeof(Word). Maybe there is a whole level of HsInt vs CInt discrimination missing? Cheers, Moritz

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GitLab e-mails: down for everyone, or just me?
by Ryan Scott 22 Oct '20

22 Oct '20

Since yesterday, I haven't been receiving any e-mail notifications from GitLab. Are other people having this problem too, or is it a problem on my end? Ryan S.

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Fwd: Restricted sums in BoxedRep
by David Feuer 15 Oct '20

15 Oct '20

Forwarded from Andrew Martin below. I think we want more than just Maybe (more than one null), but the nesting I described is certainly more convenience than necessity. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Andrew Martin <andrew.thaddeus(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 4:14 PM Subject: Re: Restricted sums in BoxedRep To: David Feuer <david.feuer(a)gmail.com> You'll have to forward this to the ghc-devs list to share it with others since I'm not currently subscribed to it, but I've had this same thought before. It is discussed at https://github.com/andrewthad/impure-containers/issues/12. Here's the relevant excerpt: > Relatedly, I was thinking the other day that after finishing implementing > https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0203-p…, > I should really look at seeing if it's possible to add this > maybe-of-a-lifted value trick straight to GHC. I think that with: > > data RuntimpRep > = BoxedRep Levity > | MaybeBoxedRep Levity > | IntRep > | ... > > data BuiltinMaybe :: forall (v :: Levity). TYPE v -> TYPE ('MaybeBoxedRep v) > > This doesn't have the nesting issues because the kind system prevents > nesting. But anyway, back to the original question. I would recommend not > using Maybe.Unsafe and using unpacked-maybe instead. The latter is > definitely safe, and it only costs an extra machine word of space in each > data constructor it gets used in, and it doesn't introduce more > indirections. > On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 5:47 PM David Feuer <david.feuer(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Null pointers are widely known to be a lousy language feature in general, > but there are certain situations where they're *really* useful for compact > representation. For example, we define > > newtype TMVar a = TMVar (TVar (Maybe a)) > > We don't, however, actually use the fact that (Maybe a) is lifted. So we > could represent this much more efficiently using something like > > newtype TMVar a = TMVar (TVar a) > > where Nothing is represented by a distinguished "null" pointer. > > While it's possible to implement this sort of thing in user code (with > lots of fuss and care), it's not very nice at all. What I'd really like to > be able to do is represent certain kinds of sums like this natively. > > Now that we're getting BoxedRep, I think we can probably make it happen. > The trick is to add a special Levity constructor representing sums of > particular shapes. Specifically, we can represent a type like this if it is > a possibly-nested sum which, when flattened into a single sum, consists of > some number of nullary tuples and at most one Lifted or Unlifted type. > Then we can have (inline) primops to convert between the BoxedRep and the > sum-of-sums representations. > > Anyone have thoughts on details for what the Levity constructor arguments > might look like? > -- -Andrew Thaddeus Martin

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Perf test viewer
by Sylvain Henry 15 Oct '20

15 Oct '20

Hello everyone, Since testsuite performance results are stored into Git notes, they are more difficult to visualize. At least with values in .T files we could see the changes over time, but now increase/decrease are only indicated into commit messages (but not necessarily by how much). The only tool we have afaik is the perf_notes.py script [1] but it's not very interactive. So, long story short, I've started another one which is more interactive (in the browser). An instance is running on my server: http://hsyl20.fr:4222 It should be updated every 2 hours with newer metrics/commits from CI. Sources are here: https://github.com/hsyl20/had Any feedback/PR is welcome! Cheers, Sylvain [1] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/building/running-tests/performan…

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