I'm supportive of doing this, and am working with Edward on it. Yell if you object.
Simon
| -----Original Message-----
| From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of
| Edward Z. Yang
| Sent: 11 August 2016 20:07
| To: ghc-devs
| Subject: Landing Backpack in HEAD
|
| Hello friends,
|
| I'm hoping to land Backpack (the patch is two years in the making
| now!) for GHC 8.2, even though 8.2 is intended to be a stabilization
| and performance release. In this email, I will make the case that the
| Backpack patch is relatively self-contained and will not affect non-
| Backpack users, and explain how you might be affected by the patch.
| The most recent patchset can be found at
| https://github.com/ezyang/ghc/tree/ghc-backpack ; look for "The
| Backpack patch" in the commit log, since I plan on squashing these
| commits before committing.
|
| OK, here is what is in the patchset that affects non-Backpack users:
|
| - The primary, overarching change is that there is now
| a distinction between "semantic" and "identity" modules.
| This solves a problem with hsig files: suppose
| you have A.hsig which defines data T in package p.
| The resulting A.hi is most accurately identified
| as p[A=<A>]:A; however, the Name for T should be <A>.T,
| not p[A=<A>]:A.T. The former is an identity module
| (it *identifies* interfaces), whereas the latter is a semantic
| module (it is what is used in names). Without Backpack,
| these two identities are always the same. There are a number
| of places in the existing codepaths where we have to
| distinguish between the two concepts (sometimes you
| want semantic, sometimes you want identity); we DEFAULT
| to the identity module but I fix a few cases where
| semantic modules were desired instead.
|
| - UnitId is generalized to also record how a component
| is instantiated (a mapping from module names to modules.)
| Without Backpack this is blank and equivalent to the
| existing UnitId.
|
| - Packages has been refactored to also handle Backpack `-unit-id`
| flags, since we have to do some extra work to determine
| what inherited signatures merge where.
|
| - The patch REVERTS all of the old support we had for hsig
| files; -sig-of is no more. spinda had mentioned that
| Liquid Haskell used this in some cases, and I'm looking
| at supporting *just* their particular use-case.
|
| - A new driver mode --backpack, which process test.bkp files.
| This mode is used PURELY for testing, and end users
| are not supposed to use it. These all live in their own
| modules (BkpSyn, DriverBkp) except for some modest,
| convenient extensions to the lexer and parser to parse
| multiple modules at once.
|
| The patch also comes with rewritten typechecking support for hsig
| files, and instantiating indefinite packages on the fly, but these are
| all standalone pieces of functionality which are not tied to any
| existing compiler infrastructure.
|
| Thanks,
| Edward
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