Dear Simon*, thanks for answering my concerns about -fvia-C replacement. Are these answers somewhere in the ghc wiki, or perhaps they'd make a good basis for a useful ghc blog post? So, -fasm will soon be up to speed with -fvia-C in all cases, new native backends are not more difficult than more mangler branches, and tools for generating wrappers for CPP-based APIs should be provided. Just one additional point re:
We haven't had a single new registerised port of GHC in many years now.
Interest in new platforms is increasing again, though. People have been talking about PS3, internet tablets, multicore machines, .. Personally, I'd like to be able to use GHC on, or at least for, coming smartphone generations, etc. (I don't see myself looking at native backends there, but probably I wouldn't have braved the mangler, either; still, someone else might prefer one over the other). And I don't understand how people can be happy with unregisterised GHC ports for long, given how many optimizations GHC is not doing even in best form!-) Thanks again, Claus