Excerpts from Dave Bayer's message of Sat Apr 18 19:05:34 -0500 2009:
Yikes! You're right. I never noticed, but I never had an 8 GB Mac before.
I looked at ./configure for the GHC 6.10.2 source, and realized there was already something there. I tried
./configure --build=x86_64-apple-darwin
and it didn't work. However, it did give me something to Google, leading me to
Ticket #2965 (new feature request) GHC on OS X does not compile 64-bit 1/19/09 http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2965
Apparently this isn't a one-liner. Once my semester ends, I'll see if I can help.
I've got to wonder if it would be less work to sneak a gift Mac Pro past Microsoft security, and just wait? ;-)
The GHC team has been busting their humps on parallel code lately, and OS X does so much better... They should stop having to apologize in papers for the poor parallel performance of Linux itself. A decked-out Mac Pro should be the flagship platform for 64 bit, parallel GHC.
On Apr 18, 2009, at 1:46 PM, Daniel Peebles wrote:
That looks great! I wonder what about Mac OS leads to such good performance...
Now if only we could get a nice x86_64-producing GHC for Mac OS too, I could use all my RAM and the extra registers my Mac Pro gives me :)
Please add yourself to the CC list of the bug - more people need to show they care! I'm currently the owner of the bug, so if you bother me enough I'll get to working on it quicker (once I have more time...) At the very least, once the build system fixes are in place to allow hc-bootstrapping, it should happen fairly quickly. Right now I'm just not quite sure what the full path necessary is for getting a copy of GHC head to be 64-bit on OS X. Daniel, have you gotten anywhere with your version of GHC 6.6 on OS X? Austin