On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 07:09:25AM +1100, Julian Leviston wrote:
As a recent newcomer, it’d be nice to have the option there as a link with a warning sign “here be dragons, but try this out if you’re interested”. I tried it. It seems better than regular make already (I don’t have to guess at appropriate concurrency, for example, I just throw -j at it and it works it out assumedly because GHC can work out the number of capabilities), and it seems to work out which builds it needs to do next automatically. Both those things - at least - are more beginner friendly than manually cloning the mk/build.mk file, running ./boot && ./configure && make -j8 then adjusting the mk/build.mk file again to get make to be faster.
So, FWIW, I say put the link on the page at the top as an alternative, mark it with a warning saying something along the lines of that it might not work, but it’s the future, and it’s simpler and easier if it does, and feel free to try it out, then fallback to make. There are plenty of sharp rocks for beginners, and ironically the existing make-based build system is probably one of them. (Having said that, it’s very helpful to know the stages of compilation, so hopefully whatever docs we arrive at will point the beginner to something explaining what’s going on as they do their first bootstrapping build, for the curious.
Actually, after talking to both the Simons as well as Alp, one of the core people in the Hadrian project (if not the mastermind), we tentatively decided to write the Newcomers' Guide for Hadrian, not Make. In principle, Hadrian should be able to do everything that is needed for this, and the "regular" code paths have been tested extensively, and as you have noticed, it is a lot more user friendly. We may still want to link to the Make-based build instructions somewhere, but present Hadrian as the default option. A short explanation of build stages will of course still be in the Guide - they are just as relevant to Hadrian as they are to the Make build system. However, the tutorial is quite long as it is already, so I want to keep it as short as possible, delegating in-depth explanations to other (ideally existing) wiki pages. If you like, you can follow along with my progress: https://github.com/tdammers/ghc-wiki/blob/wip/newcomers/newcomers-tutorial.m...