#13152: Provide a mechanism to notify build system when .hi file is ready -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: rwbarton | Owner: Type: feature | Status: new request | Priority: normal | Milestone: 8.2.1 Component: Driver | Version: 8.1 Keywords: | Operating System: Unknown/Multiple Architecture: | Type of failure: None/Unknown Unknown/Multiple | Test Case: | Blocked By: Blocking: | Related Tickets: Differential Rev(s): | Wiki Page: -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- In one-shot mode GHC typically finishes writing the interface file around halfway through compilation. A dependent module (if it doesn't use Template Haskell) only needs the interface file to start building. If we could start building a module as soon as all its dependencies' interface files are ready, we would cut the critical path by about a factor of 2; and parallelism in the GHC build tree is currently low enough that this should give significantly lower build times even on only modestly parallel systems. The first obstruction to doing this is that there isn't a good way to know when the interface file becomes ready. I propose the following simple and flexible mechanism: * Add a GHC command-line argument `-finterface-file-finished=N,F,str`. When GHC has finished writing the interface file it uses the `send` system call to send the string `str` to file descriptor `N` using flags `F`. The build system might then invoke GHC with file descriptor `N` open to a UNIX datagram socket, for example, and generate a unique `str` for each interface file dependency. Alternative suggestions are more than welcome. I tentatively milestoned this for 8.2 since it would be nice to have this available in the bootstrapping compiler when we switch to Hadrian, and the GHC-side implementation should be simple. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/13152 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler