August 2011 - Glasgow-haskell-users

ANNOUNCE: GHC version 7.2.1
by Ian Lynagh 27 Mar '12

27 Mar '12

============================================================= The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 7.2.1 ============================================================= The GHC Team is pleased to announce a new major release of GHC, 7.2.1. The 7.2 branch is intended to be more of a "technology preview" than normal GHC stable branches; in particular, it supports a significantly improved version of DPH, as well as new features such as compiler plugins and "safe Haskell". The design of these new features may evolve as we get more experience with them. See the release notes for more details of what's new and what's changed. We are also using this branch as an opportunity to work out the best workflows to use with git. We expect the 7.2 branch to be short-lived, with 7.4.1 coming out shortly after ICFP as normal. Full release notes are here: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.2.1/html/users_guide/release-7-2-1.html How to get it ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The easy way is to go to the web page, which should be self-explanatory: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ We supply binary builds in the native package format for many platforms, and the source distribution is available from the same place. Packages will appear as they are built - if the package for your system isn't available yet, please try again later. Background ~~~~~~~~~~ Haskell is a standard lazy functional programming language. GHC is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell. Included is an optimising compiler generating good code for a variety of platforms, together with an interactive system for convenient, quick development. The distribution includes space and time profiling facilities, a large collection of libraries, and support for various language extensions, including concurrency, exceptions, and foreign language interfaces (C, whatever). GHC is distributed under a BSD-style open source license. A wide variety of Haskell related resources (tutorials, libraries, specifications, documentation, compilers, interpreters, references, contact information, links to research groups) are available from the Haskell home page (see below). On-line GHC-related resources ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web: GHC home page http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ GHC developers' home page http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ Haskell home page http://www.haskell.org/ Supported Platforms ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them, is here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Contributors Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of difficulty. The Building Guide describes how to go about porting to a new platform: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building Developers ~~~~~~~~~~ We welcome new contributors. Instructions on accessing our source code repository, and getting started with hacking on GHC, are available from the GHC's developer's site run by Trac: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ Mailing lists ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use the web interfaces at http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-bugs There are several other haskell and ghc-related mailing lists on www.haskell.org; for the full list, see http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ Some GHC developers hang out on #haskell on IRC, too: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel Please report bugs using our bug tracking system. Instructions on reporting bugs can be found here: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug

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partially applied type synonyms
by Arie Peterson 05 Mar '12

05 Mar '12

Dear list, Is there a good reason that partially applied type synonyms cannot be made instances of classes? - A simple example would be making the identity type 'Id' ("type Id x = x") instance of 'Monad'. This would eliminate the need for some silly occurrences of 'runIdentity', and perhaps narrow the gap between monads and monad transformers. - The reason I complain about this now is a more involved example, where introducing a newtype to work around the restriction is not an option. Well, not as far as I can see now, anyway. Partially applied type synonyms are, in a sense, the anonymous functions at the type level, and one might argue that they deserve the same 'first-class member status' as the lambda at the value level. Kind regards, Arie Peterson

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ANNOUNCE: GHC 7.2.1 Release Candidate 1
by Ian Lynagh 11 Feb '12

11 Feb '12

We are pleased to announce the first release candidate for GHC 7.2.1: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/7.2.1-rc1/ This includes the source and testsuite tarballs, installers for OS X and Windows, and bindists for amd64/Linux, i386/Linux, amd64/FreeBSD and i386/FreeBSD. Please test as much as possible; bugs are much cheaper if we find them before the release! Thanks Ian, on behalf of the GHC team

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Proposal to incorporate Haskell.org
by Don Stewart 16 Dec '11

16 Dec '11

Hello everyone. The haskell.org committee[1], in the interest of the long-term stability of the open source Haskell community infrastructure, has decided to incorporate haskell.org as a legal entity. This email outlines our recommendation, and seeks input from the community on this decision. The committee's proposal is that haskell.org incorporate as an entity under the Software Freedom Conservancy umbrella organization (the same group that Darcs joined recently): http://sfconservancy.org/ If we proceed with this move, haskell.org will be a legal entity, and registered as a non-profit, allowing us to more directly accept (US tax-deductible) donations, and to invest in assets that benefit the Haskell open source community. We welcome your feedback on the proposal attached below. -- Don Stewart (on behalf of the Haskell.org committee) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ = A proposal for the incorporation of Haskell.org = In recent years, haskell.org has started to receive assets, e.g. money from Google Summer Of Code, donations for Hackathons, and a Sparc machine for use in GHC development. We have also started spending this money: in particular, on hosting haskell.org itself. There is also interest in running fundraising drives for specific things such as Hackathon sponsorship and hosting fees. However, haskell.org doesn't currently exist as a legal entity, meaning that these assets have had to be held on our behalf by other entities, such as Galois and various universities. This leads to tricky situations, with no-one being sure who should decide how the haskell.org assets can be used. To solve these problems, we propose that haskell.org applies to become a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) <http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/>. The SFC is a non-profit organization that provides free financial and administrative services to open source projects. Additionally, it has 501(c)(3) status, meaning donations from the US are tax-deductible. The SFC would hold haskell.org's money and other assets, and would be able to accept donations on behalf of haskell.org. The haskell.org committee, as described here [2], will make decisions on spending assets and other decisions related to governing the non-profit. Before proceeding, we are inviting input from the community in the form of specific objections or queries regarding the plan. We've tried to answer some of the most likely questions: Q: Does this mean that my Haskell project must now be covered by a copyleft licence such as GPL? A: No, but Haskell projects using haskell.org resource should use an Open Source licence <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical>. Q: Will it still be possible to use community.h.o to host non-open-source material, such as academic papers? A: An overall minority of such content, as is the current situation, is not a problem. Q: Will it still be possible to have job ads on the haskell.org mailing lists and website? A: Yes. Q: Will this affect our ability to host the Haskell Symposium <http://www.haskell.org/haskell-symposium/> and Industrial Haskell Group<http://industry.haskell.org/> webpages within haskell.org? A: No. Q: What will be the relationship between haskell.org and other organizations such as the Haskell Symposium and Industrial Haskell Group? A: Those organisations will continue to exist as separate entities. Q: If an umbrella non-profit organisation "The Haskell Foundation" was created, would haskell.org be able to join it? A: Yes. It's likely that in such a scenario, the Haskell Foundation would become the owner of the haskell.org domain name, with the cost divided between the members. The entity that is part of the SFC would be renamed "community.haskell.org" in order to avoid confusion. [1]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell.org_committee [2]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell.org_committee#Operation

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Re: [Pkg-haskell-maintainers] libffi soname change upcoming
by Joachim Breitner 04 Oct '11

04 Oct '11

Hi, Am Mittwoch, den 24.08.2011, 12:44 +0200 schrieb Matthias Klose: > > The question that has to be answered first is: Assume the libraries do > > not depend on libffi themselves, and only ghc does. Now you update > > libffi and ghc gets rebuilds, what will happen: > > > > A) The haskell ABIs stay the same, the existing library packages can > > still be used. Great. > > > > B) The haskell ABIs change. We’ll have to binNMU all Haskell libraries, > > but oh well, not bad thanks to BD-Uninstallable-support in wanna-build > > and autosigning. > > > > C) The haskell ABIs do not change, but the old library builds are > > broken nevertheless. Big mess. Hard to recover from, because builds are > > not ordered automatically any more. Needs lots of NMUes and Dep-Waits. > > sorry, I don't get the `C' case. why should these be broken by a libffi or > libgmp change? Maybe it’s an unrealistic example, but I could imagine that ghc some data type (size) defined by libffi is used when generating code for a haskell library under the assumption that it has the same structure/size in the run time system and/or other used haskell libraries. But instead of making blind guesses, maybe GHC upstream can enlighten us: Is it safe to build ghc and a Haskell library, then upgrade libffi to a new version (with soname bump), rebuild ghc, but use the previous library build? > > Removing the libffi dependencies from the haskell libraries makes C > > possible and only helps with A. So until someone investigates this, I’d > > rather err on the safe side, leave the dependencies in, and fix the > > issue by rebuilding all haskell libraries when you upload the new ffi > > soname to unstable. > > well, with binNMU orgies like this you'll pull in any new or tightened > dependencies for shared libraries. Not depending on these unused libraries > does avoid this. True. I agree that it would be nice and worthwhile to remove the libffi dependency from the libraries, but only if it is actually safe and scenario C is guaranteed not to happen. Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer nomeata(a)debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C JID: nomeata(a)joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata

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GHC build times on newer MacBook Pros?
by Johan Tibell 05 Sep '11

05 Sep '11

Hi! I'm looking to upgrade my laptop so that I can (among other things) compile GHC faster. I'll either get the 13" 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 model or the 15" 2.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 model. Anyone know if it's worth to get the 15" model? According to these benchmarks it should be quite a bit faster: http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/ but I don't know if I can get enough parallelism out of GHC's build to use all 4 cores in the 15" model. -- Johan

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Superclass defaults
by Simon Peyton-Jones 05 Sep '11

05 Sep '11

(Adding GHC users, and changing title.) | Conor McBride wrote: | > http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DefaultSuperclassInstances | > I don't know if it's likely to be implemented in GHC anytime soon,.. | > So things are looking up. It should soon be technically feasible to | > separate the issues of whether the Monoid operator should be (<>) and | > whether it should actually live in a Semigroup superclass... | | Nice. But will it be happening soon, or not? And how soon is | soon? Not soon enough to be useful for this mappend question. But, concerning proposed extensions to GHC about class aliases/superclass defaults etc, the truth is that the biggest reason for inertia here at GHC HQ is not so much the implementation effort (athough that is always an issue). Rather, it's uncertainty about (a) Is there a reasonably large group of users who really want such a change? Or is it just "nice to have"? (b) What is the "right" design? (c) Does it pay its way? (ie do the programming benefits justify the cost in terms of both language complexity and ongoing maintenance burden of one more feature to bear in mind when changing anything) With help from Conor we have made some progress on this: we have a draft design: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DefaultSuperclassInstances If you care about the issue, maybe you can help resolve the above questions. In particular, to give concrete evidence for (b), working out some case studies would be a Good Thing. The examples given in other proposals using the extension proposed here would be one starting point. If someone felt able to act as moderator for the discussion, willing to summarise conclusions, open questions, and so on, on the wiki page, that would be enormously helpful. I am in too many inner loops. But I *am* willing to contemplate such an extension -- it has the same flavour as default methods themselves, which are a very useful part of H98. Simon

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Panic when using syb with GHC API
by Simon Hengel 01 Sep '11

01 Sep '11

Hello, I'm trying to query a type-checked module with syb, this works for a plain binding. But as soon as I add a type signature for that binding, I get an "panic!" I experienced similar problems with a renamed module. Are those data structures meant to be used with syb? And if yes, what did I miss? Bellow is some code to reproduce my issue. Any help is very much appreciated. -- A.hs module Main where import GHC import Outputable import Data.Generics import GHC.Paths (libdir) import Bag main :: IO () main = do m <- parse putStrLn $ showSDoc $ ppr $ m putStrLn "\n---\n" putStrLn $ showSDoc $ ppr $ selectAbsBinds m parse = runGhc (Just libdir) $ do _ <- getSessionDynFlags >>= setSessionDynFlags target <- guessTarget "B.hs" Nothing setTargets [target] Succeeded <- load LoadAllTargets modSum <- getModSummary $ mkModuleName "B" m <- parseModule modSum >>= typecheckModule return $ typecheckedSource m selectAbsBinds :: GenericQ [HsBindLR Id Id] selectAbsBinds = everything (++) ([] `mkQ` f) where f x@(AbsBinds _ _ _ _ _) = [x] f _ = [] -- B.hs module B where foo :: Char foo = 'f' Cheers, Simon

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How to synchronously shutdown the event manager loop
by Bas van Dijk 31 Aug '11

31 Aug '11

Hello, In my (still unreleased) usb-1.0 (https://github.com/basvandijk/usb) library I use the GHC event manager for managing events from the underlying `libusb` C library. To work with the library a user has to initialize it using: newCtx ∷ IO Ctx The `Ctx` then allows the user to see the USB devices attached to the system using: getDevices ∷ Ctx → IO [Device] >From thereon a user can open devices using: openDevice ∷ Device → IO DeviceHandle and perform IO with them: readBulk ∷ DeviceHandle → EndpointAddress → Size → Timeout → IO (B.ByteString, Status) Internally the synchronous `readBulk` is implemented using asynchronous IO: first a request to read bytes from a USB device is asynchronously submitted. Then it waits on a lock (`takeMVar lock`). When the bytes are read an event is fired on a certain file descriptor. The GHC event manager then wakes up and calls a callback which will release the lock (`putMVar lock ()`). I choose to have one event loop per session (`Ctx`) with the usb library. This means that I make a new `EventManager` in `newCtx`: evtMgr ← EventManager.new register the `libusb` file descriptors with the event manager and fork a thread which will `loop` the `EventManager`: tid <- forkIOWithUnmask $ \unmask → unmask $ EventManager.loop evtMgr The underlying `libusb` C library needs to be deinitialized when you're done with it. However for safety and ease of use a user of my Haskell library doesn't need to explicitly deinitialize the library. Instead this happens automatically when the garbage collector collects an unreferenced `Ctx` by registering (using `Foreign.Concurrent.newForeignPtr`) the following finalizer with the `Ctx` foreign pointer: -- Stop the event handling loop by killing its thread: killThread tid ... -- Finally deinitialize libusb: c'libusb_exit ctxPtr As you see I also kill the thread which is running the event manager loop. However I think this is not the right way to do it because when I use the library I see the following message being continually printed after the `Ctx` is finalized: ghc: ioManagerWakeup: write: Bad file descriptor Note that when I remove the `killThread tid` the messages disappear. It seems that killing the event manager loop is not allowed. Is there another way of shutting down the event manager loop? I know I can shut it down by using the `shutdown` function. However this function is asynchronous. This won't work because I need to make sure the event loop is shutdown before I exit the `libusb` library (because that will close the file descriptors that the event loop is working with). I see the event manager provides the `finished` function which will poll the manager to see if it stopped looping. This function is not exported however. Is it possible to export this function? It would be even nicer to have a synchronous shutdown function so that I don't need to setup a loop that waits till the manager has been shut down. Regards, Bas

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ghc fails to build due to trust issues
by Bas van Dijk 30 Aug '11

30 Aug '11

Hello, I'm trying to build recent ghc-HEAD using ghc-7.2.1 but get the following error: libraries/filepath/System/FilePath/Internal.hs:81:1: base:Data.List can't be safely imported! The package (base) the module resides in isn't trusted. I guess a "-trust base" flag has to be passed to ghc somewhere. Regards, Bas

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