On 07/11/13 05:03, Evan Laforge wrote:
Is anyone out there using HPC? It seems like it was gotten into a more or less working if not ideal state, and then abandoned.
Things I've noticed lately:
The GHC runtime just quits on the spot if there's already a tix file. This bit me when I was parallelizing tests. It's also completely unsafe when run concurrently, mostly it just overwrites the file, sometimes it quits. Sure to cause headaches for someone trying to parallelize tests.
You can't change the name of the output tix file, so I worked around by hardlinking the binary to a bunch of new ones, and then doing 'hpc sum' on the results.
The hpc command is super slow. It might have to do with it doing its parsing with Prelude's 'read', and it certainly doesn't help the error msgs.
And the whole thing is generally minimally documented.
I can already predict the answer will be "yes, HPC could use some love, roll up your sleeves and welcome!" It does look like it could be improved a lot with just a bit of effort, but that would be a yak too far for me, at the moment. I'm presently just curious if anyone else out there is using it, and if they feel like it could do with a bit of polishing.
I think the core functionality of HPC is working pretty well, I gave it an overhaul when I combined the internal mechanisms used by HPC, Profiling and the GHCi debugger. The surrounding tooling and documentation, as you say, could do with some love. I think this would be a great way for someone to get involved with GHC development, because for the most part it's not deep technology, and there are lots of small improvements to make. A good way to start would be to create some feature-request tickets describing some improvements that could be made. Cheers, Simon