On 19 July 2005 17:17, Peter A Jonsson wrote:

Perl 5.6.0 seems to be released 2000-Mar-22, demanding that people who build ghc have a perl that is no older than 5 years might be a reasonable first step?

Ok, done.

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Needed a patch to build NCG. I tried to preserve as much of the previous structure in order to avoid introducing bugs, but I wasn't entirely successfull. I've attached the patch and would appreciate if someone could glance over it looking for obvious errors.

There are never any "obvious" errors in the NCG :-) I did glance over it, and it mostly looks like a straightforward change over to Cmm. Since your patch only touches code inside #ifdef sparc_TARGET_ARCH, which is currently broken anyway, I'm inclined to just merge it as-is.

That sounds good to me, a smaller diff would hopefully make my life easier.

About the lack of sparc-support - is the problem that no active developers have access to sparc-machines any longer or is there simply no interest in sparc? If it is the former, contact me off list and I'll try to help out.

I can get access to a machine, but I don't have a lot of time to maintain the Sparc port (and it's always harder to fix things remotely). We've been advertising for a Sparc guru for a while, but no takers so far.

The stack-check sequence you are referring to, is that in Cmm represented by "if ((Sp + -12) < SpLim) goto <label>"? If that is the case, I can't find any errors in the asm produced.

Any hints that would ease the burden of reading big chunks of assembler would be much appreciated!

Compiling programs with -debug is a good first step - that links in the debugging version of the RTS, with lots of ASSERTs and support for the debugging output flags (-Dxxx, -Ds and -DS are my favourites). Cheers, Simon