Re: The GHC 8.0 feature freeze is coming

On 03/12/2015 13:50, Ben Gamari wrote:

Luite Stegeman writes:

...

Is Simon's remote GHCi patch planned to go in before the fork? I'm still working on upgrading GHCJS to work with the master branch, but I haven't quite finished yet. This change would clearly require some restructuring of GHCJSi and Template Haskell in GHCJS, and I'm not sure if a week is enough to test the changes. Also the recent removal of boot file merging reintroduces a problem with that I'm not sure can be fixed without adding a new hook.

Simon, what do you think about this?

I'm a bit worried that this patch is quite late and breaks users like Luite. Nevertheless, I am willing to hear arguments for merging.

It doesn't have to go in, but I think it would be nice. I'd like to have it out for at least one major release in a disabled-by-default state so that we can experiment with it. But as far as my particular goals for this feature are concerned, I'll backport the patch to 7.10 and use it in our local GHC build at Facebook regardless. Luite - the hooks you use are still intact, so I don't think you have to do any major restructuring in GHCJS until you're ready. What I've implemented will almost certainly need work to be usable or shareable with GHCJS, and it's not clear to me exactly what the changes will look like, but for the time being I thought the changes should not impact GHCJS's implementation of TH & GHCi. I could be wrong though, if so please let me know how it breaks you. Cheers, Simon

...

What's the policy on adding hooks or GHC API tweaks after the freeze?

We'll need to work that out when we get to that point. It largely depends upon how confined and "safe" a change appears to be. That being said, given how much other churn has happened for this release, I don't think we want to be sloppy with merge discipline this time around.

Austin, what do you think?

Cheers,

- Ben