On 30/06/2010 22:15, George Brewster wrote:
Hey, I'd really like to see ghc working on 64-bit Windows, so I've decided to take at least a quick stab at getting it going. Having talked to some of the people on #ghc, it sounds like the first thing to do is get an unregisterised build going, which sounded like it may be managable. So to that end, I've pulled the 6.12 branch, done a 32-bit build, changed the build config to do an unregisterised build and turn off the native code generator, found a version of mingw64 which seems to work for me, stuffed it in in place of the in-tree mingw, and got my build to fail.
At this point, I'd like to get a general idea of what my strategy should be. I read the Building/Porting page on the wiki, and used the config file there as an example of how to do an unregisterised build, but have been ignoring anything related to the hc file bootstrapping process, as I have a working ghc on my platform, just of the wrong bitness.
In particular, if there are any changes that you know I'll need to make to the source to get this working, please let me know. The more of those I learn about now, the less fumbling around I'll have to do as things break. In particular, is there some place where I indicate that I'm build a 64-bit compiler? I didn't find anything with a quick look.
I have very little time to work on it, and no familiarity with ghc internals, so I wouldn't expect much, but I'm hoping I can get it going...
We'd like to support cross-compilation for this kind of scenario, but it isn't working right now. I just created this ticket and wiki page: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4163 HC bootstrapping in theory works, but is suffering from bitrot at the moment, see http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3472 a lot of manual intervention is required to bootstrap right now. The way forward is to get cross-compilation working, if you'd like to help us out that would be great. Cheers, Simon