Simon Peyton Jones
Ben, Matthew, Moritz, and friends
Is this wiki page about architectures still accurate? https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/platforms
Hi Simon, Indeed there were a few inaccuracies on that page; I have fixed these and generally cleaned up the page.
For example, ARM is not Tier 1, or "apple silicon".
Yet I know some of our developers have invested lots of effort in other architectures, so maybe those efforts are not reflected here.
Fairly recently there has been work on RISC-V (rv64) and PowerPC (ppc64le), as well as some work on s390x via LLVM. However, I wouldn't consider any of these Tier 1.
Relevant is Moritz's post about 32-bit architectures https://discourse.haskell.org/t/running-project-built-on-raspberry-pi-with-c... .
We should in due course add Javascript and Web Assembly as Tier 1 back ends?
Indeed, that is the plan although 9.6 will rather ship these as Tier 2 targets.
Are we saying "if your customer bases uses Tier 2 architectures, you can't rely on GHC from one release to the next"? I wonder if there are companies for which Tier-2 architectures are mission-critical. Mis-aligned expectations cause upset.
I have heard that some people are using amd64/FreeBSD, although that can very nearly be promoted to a Tier 1 now. Bodigrim once mentioned that he was considering deploying Haskell on s390x, although I'm not sure what became of that. Otherwise I would be quite surprised if any commercial customers are relying on any of the other Tier 2 or Tier 3 platforms.
I mention all this because it is relevant to our stability guarantees. Every time we release we should point to this list.
My sense is that this list should ideally rather live in the users guide since it changes from release to release. Cheers, - Ben