On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 12:25 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd@gmail.com> wrote:
On 05/01/2014 23:48, John Lato wrote:
(FYI, I expect I'm the source of the suggestion that ghc -M is broken)

First, just to clarify, I don't think ghc -M is obviously broken.
  Rather, I think it's broken in subtle, unobvious ways, such that
trying to develop a make-based project with ghc -M will fail at various
times in a non-obvious fashion, at least without substantial additional
rules.

If I understand you correctly, you're not saying that ghc -M is broken, but that it would be easier to use if it did more.  Right?  Maybe you could make specific suggestions?  Saying it is "broken" is a bit FUD-ish.  We use it in GHC's build system, so by an existence proof it is certainly not broken.

This is more-or-less true.  To be a bit more precise, I'm saying that the raw output from ghc -M is insufficient in several interesting/useful cases.  I'm also not convinced that it's worth anyone's time to add the necessary features to ghc -M to cover these cases, or indeed that it's even necessarily the correct place to fix it.

Some specific shortcomings of ghc -M are:

1.  no support for .cmm file dependencies (though in fairness, --make doesn't track these either)
2.  no support for Language.Haskell.TH.Syntax.addDependentFile
3.  no support for preprocessing, such as .hsc or #include'd files.  (I think it would work to write a .hs file that uses -pgmF to call hsc2hs, but that seems rather non-obvious and I'm not sure it's a good idea).

However, these are all rather obviously fixable as part of the build system.  For me, the worst problems have to do with cleaning.  If you're using a Makefile, typically you want to leave intermediate object files around and only rebuild them when the sources have changed.  However, there are various issues with ghc batch-mode that make this difficult (e.g. https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8029 ).  The workarounds to deal with this are not as straightforward.  The alternative is to live with the occasional build error that can only be fixed by blowing away the entire build dir (a remedy that I often need with ghc's source tree, as even make maintainer-clean doesn't always cut it.  Hopefully my experience here is unique, but I do not believe it is).

Also, the most common use case seems to be for parallel building of modules.  As ghc-7.8 provides this with --make, I'd expect the demand for ghc -M will be greatly reduced.  That's why I'm not certain it's worth the time it would take to resolve these issues.

Cheers,
John


Cheers,
Simon



  For an example of some of the extra steps necessary to make
something like this work, see e.g.
https://github.com/nh2/multishake (which is admittedly for a more
complicated setup, and also has some issues).  The especially
frustrating part is, just when you think you have everything working,
someone wants to add some other tool to a workflow (hsc2hs, .cmm files,
etc), and your build system doesn't support it.

ghc --make doesn't allow building several binaries in one run, however
if you use cabal all the separate runs will use a shared build
directory, so subsequent builds will be able to take advantage of the
intermediate output of the first build.  Of course you could do the same
without cabal, but it's a convenient way to create a common build
directory and manage multiple targets.  This is the approach I would
take to building multiple executables from the same source files.

ghc doesn't do any locking of build files AFAIK.  Running parallel ghc
commands for two main modules that have the same import, using the same
working directory, is not safe.  In pathological cases the two different
main modules may even generate different code *for the imported module*.
  This sort of situation can arise with the IncoherentInstances
extension, for example.

The obvious approach is of course to make a library out of your common
files.  This has the downsides of requiring a bit more work on the
developer's part, but if the common files are relatively stable it'll
probably lead to the fastest builds of your executables.  Also in this
case you could run multiple `ghc --make`s in parallel, using different
build directories, since they won't be rebuilding any common code.

John L.

On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Sami Liedes <sami.liedes@iki.fi
<mailto:sami.liedes@iki.fi>> wrote:

    Hi,

    I have a Haskell project where a number of executables are produced
    from mostly the same modules. I'm using a Makefile to enable parallel
    builds. I received advice[1] that ghc -M is broken, but that there
    is parallel ghc --make in HEAD.

    As far as I can tell, ghc --make does not allow building several
    binaries in one run, so I think it may not still be a full replacement
    for Makefiles.

    However I have a question about ghc --make that is also relevant
    without parallel ghc --make:

    If I have two main modules, prog1.hs and prog2.hs, which have mutual
    dependencies (for example, both import A from A.hs), is it safe to run
    "ghc --make prog1" in parallel with "ghc --make prog2"? IOW, is there
    some kind of locking to prevent both from building module A at the
    same time and interfering with each other?

    Is there a good way (either in current releases or HEAD) to build
    multiple binaries partially from the same sources in parallel?

             Sami


    [1]
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20938894/generating-correct-link-dependencies-for-ghc-and-makefile-style-builds

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