On 10/25/2014 12:52 AM, Austin Seipp wrote:
Hi *,
A few days ago a discussion on IRC occurred about the LLVM backend, its current status, and what we could do to make it a rock solid part of GHC for all our users.
Needless to say, the situation right now isn't so hot: we have no commitment to version support, two major versions are busted, others are seriously buggy, and yet there are lots of things we could improve on.
So I give you a proposal, from a few of us to you all, about improving it:
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ImprovedLLVMBackend
I won't repeat what's on the wiki page too much, but the TL;DR version is: we should start packaging a version of LLVM, and shipping it with e.g. binary distributions of GHC. It's just a lot better for everyone.
I know we're normally fairly hesitant about things like this (shipping external dependencies), but I think it's the only sane thing to do here, and the situation is fairly unique in that it's not actually very complicated to implement or support, I think.
We'd like to do this for 7.12. I've also wrangled some people to help. Those people know who they are (because they're CC'd), and I will now badger them into submission until it is fixed for 7.12.
Please let me know what you think.
PS. Joachim, I would be particularly interested in upstream needs for Debian, as I know of their standard packaging policy to not duplicate things.
I don't think any distro wants to duplicate things. Even if GHC does end up shipping with LLVM, it should be easy for distro packagers to ignore that and use their own. -- Mateusz K.