- Glasgow-haskell-users

Rebuilding GHC on Mac OSX PPC
by Joel Reymont 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Simon, Did you say I need to check out the version from CVS and build that? I tried building crypto with the darwinports version and it went fine. I did not see -threaded passed to stage2 builds, though. Thanks, Joel -- http://wagerlabs.com/

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--show-iface grammar?
by David House 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Hi list. Is there a document anywhere describing the grammar of the --show-iface output? Should there be one? This seems like a fairly complicated output, and parsing it could be very useful for tools that, e.g., need to know the strictness of various functions. Thanks in advance. -- -David House, dmhouse(a)gmail.com

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cost of Integer
by Serge D. Mechveliani 31 Jul '06

31 Jul '06

By my previous letter about cost(Integer)/cost(Int) = 2.55 I wanted to ask is there anything new in ghc-6.4.1 in comparison to, say, ghc-5.01, to ghc-4, with relation to this cost ratio? Regards, ----------------- Serge Mechveliani mechvel(a)botik.ru

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Replacement for GMP as Bignum: ARPREC? Haskell?; OS-X and OpenSSL
by p.tanski＠gmail.com 30 Jul '06

30 Jul '06

GHC Task Ticket # 601 suggests replacing GMP with OpenSSL's Bignum library, BN. I have two questions concerning this: (1) Why not use the ARbitrary PRECision Computation Package (ARPREC) by David Bailey, Yozo Hida, Karthik Jeyabalan, Xiaoye Li and Brandon Thompson? Here is a reference web page: http://crd.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/mpdist/ ARPREC is written in C++ but supports calls from C (see include/arprec/c_mp.h in the distribution directory). ARPREC is very fast and supports more complex mathematics than BN. The Licensing for ARPREC is not a problem: essentially similar to BSD3. Note that there would be a basic configuration fix for building OpenSSL's BN library on OS 10.4: you would probably--I had to, myself--have to temporarily move the default installation of /usr/lib/libssl0.9.dylib (and variants) if you want to create a shared (.a) library because Apple's ln links dynamic libraries in preference to shared libraries. Those of you who have some experience with Apple's gcc also know that Apple's gcc does not recognise the -shared flag. (2) A much more aesthetic solution would be to replace any external Bignum library with a pure Haskell library. There are many problems with building a truly efficient and fast Bignum library in Haskell but challenges like that are how languages evolve... -Peter Tanski

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(Repost) Replacement for GMP as Bignum: ARPREC? Haskell?; OS X and OpenSSL
by p.tanski＠gmail.com 30 Jul '06

30 Jul '06

(Sorry for the repost: I needed to correct a few typos--thanks Seth--and clarify a few things.) GHC Task Ticket # 601 suggests replacing GMP with OpenSSL's Bignum library, BN. I have two questions concerning this: (1) Why not use the ARbitrary PRECision Computation Package (ARPREC) by David Bailey, Yozo Hida, Karthik Jeyabalan, Xiaoye Li and Brandon Thompson? Here is a reference web page: http://crd.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/mpdist/ ARPREC is written in C++ but supports calls from C (see include/arprec/c_mp.h in the distribution directory). ARPREC is very fast and supports more complex mathematics than BN. The Licensing for ARPREC is not a problem: essentially similar to BSD3. Note that there would be a basic configuration fix for building OpenSSL's BN library on OS 10.4: you would probably--I had to, myself--have to temporarily move the default installation of /usr/lib/libssl0.9.dylib (and variants) if you want to create a static (.a) library because Apple's ln links dynamic libraries in preference to static libraries. (2) A much more aesthetic solution would be to replace any external Bignum library with a pure Haskell library. There are many problems with building a truly efficient and fast Bignum library in Haskell but challenges like that are how languages evolve... Both GHC and nhc98 seem to use GMP, OCaml uses a custom bignum library written by Xavier Leroy and even MLton uses GMP. Robert Dockins wrote a type-based library for arbitrary that can (slowly) handle big numbers (up to 10^15), see http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~rdocki01/typenats.html I don't know what the constraints on making such native Integer support work in GHC but my comment on the evolution of Haskell was not meant badly: native Integer support would require modifications to how Integers are handled in memory. (I would be glad to lend whatever support I could on this, but it seems like a big project.) -Peter Tanski

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Re: Re: Rebuilding GHC on Mac OSX PPC
by p.tanski＠gmail.com 30 Jul '06

30 Jul '06

Sorry to flood your mailboxes with my junk, but I had a few questions on the configuration and Makefiles for building GHC on OS 10.4: The odd memory bugs (wierd malloc errors) seem to remind me of errors using pthreads... in Joel Reymont's email, I noticed that ghc is given the -threaded option: ../../ghc/compiler/stage1/ghc-inplace -o stage2/ghc-6.4.3 ... ... -threaded -package readline -DUSE_READLINE - I have not had any luck using -threaded with GHC on my own programs, but I do not know what options GHC passes to gcc with -threaded. If GHC -threaded means it passes gcc the -pthread option when compiling -fvia-C, the problem might be that Apple's gcc does not recognize the -pthread flag (you have to link -lpthread manually, preferably after the object files). If I can get the configuration correct--or whatever parameters you think you might want--I will get a clean distribution and try to build ghc-6.4.3 tomorrow (I am using a 1.25 MHz PPC). -Peter Tanski

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GHC 6.4.3 is stalled
by Simon Peyton-Jones 29 Jul '06

29 Jul '06

Folks GHC 6.4.2's threaded runtime system does not work right on Solaris MacOSX Possibly FreeBSD We'd love to fix these bugs and release 6.4.3, but we are stalled because we don't have easy access to these platforms, nor do we have detailed expertise in their intimate details (which is where the bugs will be lurking). If you care about these platforms, would you like to lend a hand? We probably need more help than simply "here's access to the platform", but we'd give you very strong support if you were willing to look into it. Failing that, I think we'll have to stick with 6.4.2. (And the same bugs may well show up in GHC 6.6, which we hope to release before ICFP.) Simon

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Chasing a memory leak
by Rich Fought 28 Jul '06

28 Jul '06

I'm getting into the weeds of a GHC-compiled program, and need a little help. I'm trying to chase down a memory leak and Valgrind gives me the following: ==24390== 54,844 bytes in 639 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 69 of 69 ==24390== at 0x400446D: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:149) ==24390== by 0x826337E: (within myprog) From the link map of my program this address is in the function GHCziBase_zdszddmmin_info I can't seem to find any similar reference in the GHC source or in any of my assembly files, so I'm assuming it's something the compiler puts together internally for the GHC runtime. What does this function do, or how can I find out what it does? Thanks, Rich

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GHC compile times (was Re: GHC 6.4.3 is stalled)
by Joel Reymont 27 Jul '06

27 Jul '06

On Jul 25, 2006, at 1:34 PM, Christian Maeder wrote: > On our solaris sparc machine compiling our main binary (optimized) > takes > 3h:38min whereas (only) 55min under linux. At least our sparcs may die > out sooner or later. Interestingly enough, it takes the 3+ hours to compile GHC 6.5 on my Intel Core-Duo Mac. Why would there be such a huge difference between Linux and Mac OSX on the same architecture? How can I pinpoint the bottleneck? Thanks, Joel -- http://wagerlabs.com/

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Building NewBinary with ghc 6.5
by Joel Reymont 26 Jul '06

26 Jul '06

Is there something that looks particularly wrong below? I'm on Mac OSX Intel. I'm trying to build crypto which depends on NewBinary which depends on lang (removed). --- ghc-pkg -l /usr/local/lib/ghc-6.5/package.conf: ALUT-2.0, Cabal-1.1.4, GLUT-2.0, HUnit-1.1, OpenGL-2.1, QuickCheck-1.0, base-1.0, fgl-5.2, (ghc-6.5), haskell-src-1.0, haskell98-1.0, mtl-1.0, network-1.0, parsec-2.0, readline-1.0, rts-1.0, stm-1.0, template-haskell-1.0, time-1.0, unix-1.0 junior:~/work/Haskell/NewBinary joelr$ sudo runhaskell Setup.lhs install Installing: /usr/local/lib/NewBinary-0.1/ghc-6.5 & /usr/local/bin NewBinary-0.1... Registering NewBinary-0.1... Reading package info from ".installed-pkg-config" ... done. ghc-pkg: invalid package identifier: -- http://wagerlabs.com/

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