Re: [ANNOUNCE] GHC 7.10.3 release candidate 1

I'd be keen to see Mac support. How can I help out to test that for 8.0? On Tuesday, November 17, 2015, Ben Gamari wrote:

Richard Eisenberg javascript:;> writes:

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On Nov 4, 2015, at 11:12 AM, Peter Trommler < Peter.Trommler@th-nuernberg.de javascript:;> wrote:

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It looks like a bug to me.

I'm taking your "it" here to mean the fact that GHC is looking for readelf on a Mac OS platform. I tend to agree -- I was surprised to see this, but I'm almost-totally clueless about these things.

Thanks for the info, Richard

PS: There's been much muttering about call stacks and DWARF. I haven't a clue what DWARF is, but I always assumed that this nice feature would not be available on Macs. What I realized today is that this assumption likely stems from the fact that ELF is not for Mac. ELFs and DWARFs tend to be found near one another in other settings, but perhaps this fact doesn't carry over to computer architectures. :)

DWARF is a standard for expressing debug information about compiled native programs. It is used by almost all modern operating systems (including OS X; the only notable exception is Windows, naturally). Indeed the name is a not-so-subtle reference to the fact that DWARF debug information will often be found within ELF object files.

Recently I have been working on using the mechanisms that came out of Peter Wortmann's thesis to provide better stack traces and (statistical) profiling support for Haskell code. While at the moment I am focusing on Linux, there is little reason why this couldn't (fairly easily, I suspect) be extended to work on OS X.

Cheers,

- Ben