- ghc-devs - Haskell.org

Re: [Haskell-cafe] Numerics (was: Re: Trouble with asinh)
by Carter Schonwald 24 Sep '21

24 Sep '21

Hey David, Create a tracking ticket on the ghc for the set of changes / issues you wanna address and how, and @ me on it (I’ll then make sure to at other applicable Dolan )and I’ll try to help you get oriented and make sure it has the right visibility so we can help you out! On Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 12:00 PM David James <davjam(a)live.com> wrote: > Hi thanks for the comments. I actually have draft rewrites of the Haskell > complex functions with (I think) the correct behaviour, including branch > cuts. But I discovered the errors in the underlying real functions while > testing them. I’d like to try fixing all of these, but will probably need > some help. > > Are there instructions somewhere on the process to fix a bug (presumably > forking in GitHub, fixing code, adding test cases, running some CI, both > for Linux and Windows, etc)? (And is there something similar for fixing > mingle-w64 bugs?) > > I’ve been developing more test cases (esp for infinities +/-0, etc), but > if there are any ideas/references on how to thoroughly test real or complex > functions, that would also be useful. > > I’m currently away (and struggling to type on a phone) but will send more > details (and pictures based on those in Common Lisp The Language 2nd > edition) when I’m back. > > Thanks! David. > > > > > On 17 Sep 2021, at 22:06, Barak A. Pearlmutter <barak(a)pearlmutter.net> > wrote: > > > > I suspect that most implementations of Common Lisp just call the C > > standard library catan(3) etc, which are well tuned. > > > > $ clisp > > Welcome to GNU CLISP 2.49.92 (2018-02-18) <http://clisp.org/> > > [1]> (atan #c(0 1d-40)) > > #C(0 1.0d-40) > > > > In this particular case, the problem is that the Haskell Data.Complex > > code has its own implementation of atan, which uses a log(1 + x) in > > calculating the imaginary part. A foreign function call to the > > appropriate libm routine would robustly address this, but that would > > be difficult because it's trying to be generic over RealFloat a => > > Complex a, instead of special casing Complex Float / Complex Double. > > Anyway, the Standard Prelude code for this is naïve: it should call > > log1p, at the very least—which it actually goes to the trouble of > > defining correctly, but not exporting. > > _______________________________________________ > > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > > To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: > > http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > > Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post. >

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GHC development with VSCode
by Richard Eisenberg 23 Sep '21

23 Sep '21

Hi devs, I have migrated to use VSCode instead of emacs. There are the usual switchover pains, but I'm mostly pleased. One particular point of pleasure was that I had to do nothing, at all, to get VSCode working within the GHC code base. (Well, I had to switch to Hadrian, but perhaps that's for the best.) My problem: VSCode over GHC pins my processor at 100% if I edit anything. Any advice for fixing this? A little more detail: When VSCode starts up, it spends a while "processing" and "indexing" (no idea what these mean). OK. I can pay that one-time cost. But as I start editing, etc., it needs to process and index a lot more. Somewhat continuously. This slows my computer down generally, and -- more annoyingly -- slows down my builds (run in a separate terminal). I understand why VSCode wants to do this: it's checking my code for errors, etc. But is there a way to say "not now, please"? More specifically: I'd like to stop VSCode from detecting errors in my code while I'm actively editing. It's just too slow. On the other hand, it would be brilliant if VSCode could continue to allow me to, say, jump to definitions and gather references, using its latest knowledge of the code. As I edit, I understand this "latest knowledge" may become stale, if I'm stopping VSCode from reprocessing and reindexing. So, it would be nice to be able to tell VSCode to refresh, when I want that. Any pointers here? https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/Visual-Studio-Code <https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/Visual-Studio-Code> would be a good place to put them! Thanks, Richard

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Problem building GHC
by Solomon Bothwell 20 Sep '21

20 Sep '21

Hi. I'm a Haskell developer and I have recently started exploring and building GHC, mainly with the hope of writing some small MRs for base. I use nixos and ghc.nix to setup a build environment. Last week I was able to build `ghc-8.10.7-release` with no trouble. I'm not sure what may have happened but I am unable to build either `ghc-8-10.7-release` or `master` this week. I tried deleting my fork and creating a new one but am getting the same results. For `master` I get this error: https://gist.github.com/ssbothwell/9693a919c521decf52503e9152b879b6 For `ghc-8.10.7-release` I get this error: https://gist.github.com/ssbothwell/fb5c418b4ee509cf0ad95d4337381e9e I hope this is the right venue to be asking for help on this. Would it be better for me to write an issue on the ghc.nix github page? Thanks, Solomon.

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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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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Bundle patterns with type aliases
by Carter Schonwald 16 Sep '21

16 Sep '21

These are great ideas! Could you please create a ghc tracker ticket with a tiny examples or two? There may be specific technical reasons we might not be able to do so for type synonyms in ghc, but I don’t see any obvious barriers in the case of David’s excellent idea, I’ve def seen lots of great code out there where you’d really want either associated pattern synonyms or to bundle pattern synonyms with the exported public interface for a type class. I’m sure there’s some devil in the details but these sound lovely. Step -1 is making up 1-2 toy examples and explaining what and why you want it on a ghc ticket! On Wed, Sep 8, 2021 at 1:25 PM David Feuer <david.feuer(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I would like that, along with the ability to bundle patterns with classes. > > On Wed, Sep 8, 2021, 1:13 PM Keith <keith.wygant(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> Is there currently a way to 'bundle' a pattern with a type alias? And if >> not, could that capability be added to the PatternSynonyms GHC extension? >> (Is this the right place to ask, or should I be asking a GHC list?) >> >> --Keith >> Sent from my phone with K-9 Mail. >> _______________________________________________ >> Haskell-Cafe mailing list >> To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: >> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe >> Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post. > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: > http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.

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Documenting GHC: blogs, wiki pages, Notes, Haddocks, etc
by Simon Peyton Jones 15 Sep '21

15 Sep '21

Alfredo writes (below for full thread) That is a deceptively simple question you ask there :-) I don't have a strong view myself, but I can offer the perspective of somebody who was been for a long time on the "other side of the trenches" (i.e. working Haskell programmer, not necessarily working GHC programmer): * Blog post: yes, it's true that is a snapshot, and it's true that is not under GHC's gitlab umbrella, so I wouldn't treat it as a reliable source of documentation (for the reasons you also explain) but it's surely a good testament that "at this point in time, for this particular GHC commit, things were this way); * The wiki page: in the past, when I wanted to learn more about some GHC feature, Google would point me to the relevant Wiki page on the GHC repo describing such a feature, but I have to say I have almost always dismissed it, because everybody knows Wikis are seldomly up-to-date :) In order for a Wiki page to work we would have to at least add a banner at the top that states this can be trusted as a reliable source of information, and offer in the main section the current, up-to-date design. We can still offer the historical breakdown of the designs in later sections, as it's still valuable info to keep; * GHC notes: I have always considered GHC notes a double-edge sword -- from one side they are immensely useful when navigating the source code, but these won't be rendered in the Hackage's haddocks, and this is not helpful for GHC-the-library users willing to understand how to use (or which is the semantic of) a particular type (sure, one can click "Show Source" on Hackage but it's an annoying extra step to do just to hunt for notes). We already have Notes for this work in strategic places -- even better, we have proper Haddock comments for things like "Severity vs DiagnosticReason" , e.g. https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/blob/master/compiler/GHC/Types/Error.h…<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgitlab.ha…> . Yes Haddock doesn't understand Notes but that's a deficiency in Haddock! There so much in GHC that simply does not fit well with the Haddocks attached to a particular data decl or function. We need Notes to explain how all the moving parts fit together, and to point to them. Even better, we have proper Haddock comments for things like "Severity vs DiagnosticReason" But I don't think this is better - I think it is significantly worse! In the case you cite, the Haddock is about DiagnosticReason, and mentions Severity only incidentally. I bet that the Haddock for Severity doesn't refer to this. Nor is there a clear "Note [Severity vs DiagnosticReason]" title that bits of code across GHC can refer to by saying "See Note [Severity vs DiagnosticReason]". It's far less satisfactory (to me) than a single Note that * covers just one topic (the difference between Severity and DiagnosticReason, rather than fully describing either * can be pointed to symmetrically from both Severity and DiagnosticReason * can be pointed to by many other bits of code The way it is better is that today's Haddock doesn't understand Notes. But we could fix that if we were minded to. Returning to how to document the error-message architecture, if you'd prefer to use a Note than a wiki page, that's fine. But please write that Overview Note that explains all the pieces, points to them one by one. And then copiously refer to that Note from all those places, so people will update it. Hopefully as the time goes by the new design will "spread" across all the different peers working on GHC, and it will become "second nature". I really don't think that will happen unless there is a Note that explains what the new design is! Lacking this explicit design, everyone will infer their own mental model of how it all works from sundry scattered clues - and those mental models will differ. So instead of one thing "spreading" a dozen subtly different things will spread. And then the next one, confused by these slightly different clues, will be even less coherent. Let's have one, fully-explicit version of The Plan that we constantly refer to. cc'ing ghc-devs because we must constantly question and refine how we describe and document GHC. Simon PS: I am leaving Microsoft at the end of November 2021, at which point simonpj(a)microsoft.com<mailto:simonpj@microsoft.com> will cease to work. Use simon.peytonjones(a)gmail.com<mailto:simon.peytonjones@gmail.com> instead. (For now, it just forwards to simonpj(a)microsoft.com.) From: Alfredo Di Napoli <alfredo.dinapoli(a)gmail.com> Sent: 26 August 2021 07:25 To: Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj(a)microsoft.com> Cc: rae(a)richarde.dev Subject: Re: [Haskell Community] [Links] [Well-Typed Blog] The new GHC diagnostic infrastructure Hello Simon! On Wed, 25 Aug 2021 at 13:36, Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj(a)microsoft.com<mailto:simonpj@microsoft.com>> wrote: Alfredo Thanks for all the work you are doing on GHC's error message infrastructure. Your blog post gives a great overview. Thanks, and I am glad you enjoyed it :) As you know I'm very keen for GHC to have a Note or wiki page that gives a solid, up-to-date overview of all the moving parts. (NOT the design alternatives, nor the time sequence; just the outcome.) This is incredibly useful for our future selves; and it helps ensure that people understand (say) the difference between Severity and DiagnosticReason, and use them correctly. So the question is: where is the canonical overview? It could be * Your blog post below. But that is a snapshot... you aren't going to go back to edit it as the design evolves. And it's not in the repo. * The wiki page: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/Errors-as-(structured)-values<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgitlab.ha…>. But it's hard to keep up to date (it was last edited 3 months ago). * Note(s) in the code. We seem to use this increasingly, and it has the great merit of being part of the source code itself. But then we need clear pointer to the canonical overview Notes, and need to make sure they are up to date. I'm not advocating any particular path here... just wanting to be sure that we end up with a good overview somewhere! What is your view? TL;DR Probably a combo of a well-written (and up-to-date Wiki) plus some carefully added Notes (and Haddock comments) in GHC might do the trick. That is a deceptively simple question you ask there :-) I don't have a strong view myself, but I can offer the perspective of somebody who was been for a long time on the "other side of the trenches" (i.e. working Haskell programmer, not necessarily working GHC programmer): * Blog post: yes, it's true that is a snapshot, and it's true that is not under GHC's gitlab umbrella, so I wouldn't treat it as a reliable source of documentation (for the reasons you also explain) but it's surely a good testament that "at this point in time, for this particular GHC commit, things were this way); * The wiki page: in the past, when I wanted to learn more about some GHC feature, Google would point me to the relevant Wiki page on the GHC repo describing such a feature, but I have to say I have almost always dismissed it, because everybody knows Wikis are seldomly up-to-date :) In order for a Wiki page to work we would have to at least add a banner at the top that states this can be trusted as a reliable source of information, and offer in the main section the current, up-to-date design. We can still offer the historical breakdown of the designs in later sections, as it's still valuable info to keep; * GHC notes: I have always considered GHC notes a double-edge sword -- from one side they are immensely useful when navigating the source code, but these won't be rendered in the Hackage's haddocks, and this is not helpful for GHC-the-library users willing to understand how to use (or which is the semantic of) a particular type (sure, one can click "Show Source" on Hackage but it's an annoying extra step to do just to hunt for notes). We already have Notes for this work in strategic places -- even better, we have proper Haddock comments for things like "Severity vs DiagnosticReason" , e.g. https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/blob/master/compiler/GHC/Types/Error.h…<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgitlab.ha…> . So, in practical terms, I suggest we (I) give the Wiki a little overhaul to add at the top the current design (or anything not captured directly in GHC's source code) and I will keep an eye on the GHC notes and Haddock comments to see if there is anything worth adding. Hopefully as the time goes by the new design will "spread" across all the different peers working on GHC, and it will become "second nature". Hope it helps, and sorry for the long ramble! Alfredo Thanks Simon From: Alfredo Di Napoli via Haskell Community <discourse(a)haskell.org<mailto:discourse@haskell.org>> Sent: 23 August 2021 11:26 To: Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj(a)microsoft.com<mailto:simonpj@microsoft.com>> Subject: [Haskell Community] [Links] [Well-Typed Blog] The new GHC diagnostic infrastructure [Image removed by sender.] adinapoli<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscourse…> August 23 [Image removed by sender.]well-typed.com<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwell-type…> Error! Filename not specified. The new GHC diagnostic infrastructure - Well-Typed: The Haskell Consultants<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwell-type…> ________________________________ Visit Topic<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscourse…> or reply to this email to respond. You are receiving this because you enabled mailing list mode. To unsubscribe from these emails, click here<https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscourse…>.

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More type safety in Core?
by Ari Fordsham 14 Sep '21

14 Sep '21

I don't know if this is the right forum for this, I apologise if I'm intruding... Are there any plans to use the type system to enforce safety in Core, via e.g. GADTs? This would replace much of core-lint with static checking. Conal Eliottt has done something similar in a blog post ( http://conal.net/blog/posts/overloading-lambda#:~:text=Haskell%20source%20l…) and it seems relatively straightforward. This would be especially beneficial to those working at the cutting edge of GHC features, statically ensuring their Core manipulations are correct. I would be surprised if existing compiler bugs wouldn't be found while implementing this. What would the performance impact be? would using GADTs incur extra overhead? I'd assume you'd save something by lugging around less type information in Core. Ari Fordsham

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Resuming normal service
by Simon Peyton Jones 13 Sep '21

13 Sep '21

Friends What with the summer holidays and leaving MSR, I've been rather preoccupied and have done almost nothing on GHC for the last six weeks. I'm getting back in action now - I hope. But my GHC backlog is huge. If you are waiting on some response from me, please feel free to ping me. Simon PS: I am leaving Microsoft at the end of November 2021, at which point simonpj(a)microsoft.com<mailto:simonpj@microsoft.com> will cease to work. Use simon.peytonjones(a)gmail.com<mailto:simon.peytonjones@gmail.com> instead. (For now, it just forwards to simonpj(a)microsoft.com.)

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How to set idScope properly when converting LhsExpr GhcPs to CoreExpr?
by Yiyun Liu 10 Sep '21

10 Sep '21

Hi all, We have a function in Liquidhaskell's code base for converting refinement expressions into GHC's core expressions using the GHC API. Its implementation is based on tcRnExpr <https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/blob/ghc-8.10.6-release/compiler/typec…>except we keep the typechecked expression and desugar it before returning. However, our function fails to set the idScope information properly when LiquidHaskell is invoked as a plugin (installed as a typeCheckResultAction). This repo <https://github.com/yiyunliu/ghc-elaboration-test>contains a minimal example that demonstrates the issue. In the CoreExpr returned by elabRnExpr <https://github.com/yiyunliu/ghc-elaboration-test/blob/cb7397884b7949e6b7fb6…>, every symbol from the current module that's being compiled is labeled as local. The README.md file shows how the exported symbol testPlus is marked as local in QQQ.hs, the module where it's defined. Is there a function we should call to set the idScope information properly? Thanks, -Yiyun

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new label: diagnostic quality
by Richard Eisenberg 09 Sep '21

09 Sep '21

Hi devs, I've just created a new label in GitLab, called "diagnostic quality". (Diagnostics = errors ∪ warnings.) I intend for this label to be used when the report is about the quality of an error message or warning. That is, the existing message is not wrong, per se, but it's somehow not as helpful as it can be to users. I think it's helpful to separate out such issues from those describing error messages that are just wrong. In particular, if you spot a ticket arising from https://github.com/haskell/error-messages, you may want to give it the "diagnostic quality" label. If you disagree with the choice to make this label, please push back! Thanks, Richard

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