can anybody say something about support for gcc 3 as a backend to GHC? I heard from Ralf (see Cc) that it currently does not work. What is the cause of this, and will it be fixed? The reason it's coming up is that Gentoo Linux is slowly moving towards a release with GCC 3.2 as its default compiler. A parallel install of GCC 2 will be supported, but depending on it would of course not be as nice as one would like.
Also, I assume the old 4.08 .hc files from which we're bootstrapping can't be compiled by GCC 3 either. Will you produce a new set once the compiler supports GCC 3? I guess I could try to produce one myself otherwise, though.
GCC 3 works fine with GHC on x86. On Sparc, we had a couple of problems that were sorted out post-5.04 and the fixes will be in 5.04.1. None of this affects .hc files themselves - any problems are generally confined to the Evil Mangler(TM). So although the 4.08 .hc files should still work fine, you might need to back-port some of the fixes to the mangler into 4.08 in order to bootstrap. Cheers, Simon