Hi Ben, What is the recommended way to build old versions of GHC? The haskell.org binaries for, e.g. 7.8.3, do not work on my machine. If I attempt to recompile ghc 7.8.3 with the haskell.org binary, I get linkage errors. Actually I'd love to be able to bootstrap a build without any ghc installed... that would solve the problem. I heard about the "phase0" approach from Vitaly Bragilevsky at his Lambdaconf talk this year. But I've been unable to find any documentation about it. Best regards, Sam On 22 August 2018 at 12:30, Ben Gamari wrote:

In general we don't support bootstrapping older GHCI with newer GHC. However, you may be able to hack something together by manually tweaking bounds.

Cheers,

- Ben

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Hi Tom, I'm not sure it is necessary to go back that far. Vitaly pointed out that any version of GHC could produce the "minimal C" output, which can be ported to another platform that doesn't have a GHC, as the bootstrap. I'm not entirely sure how to generate that output, mind you. On 22 August 2018 at 17:05, wrote:

(I haven't actually done this, but:) If you want to be able to install GHC without any GHC binary, I think you'd have to start with an ancient version of GHC which wasn't itself written in Haskell, and build successive versions (skipping as many as possible) until you had a GHC which supported all the language features the most-recent version requires.

If you did embark on this, it would be nice if you could report back with a minimal number of steps it takes to get to current GHC!

Tom

...

El 22 ago 2018, a las 06:01, Sam Halliday escribió:

Hi Ben,

What is the recommended way to build old versions of GHC? The haskell.org binaries for, e.g. 7.8.3, do not work on my machine. If I attempt to recompile ghc 7.8.3 with the haskell.org binary, I get linkage errors.

Actually I'd love to be able to bootstrap a build without any ghc installed... that would solve the problem. I heard about the "phase0" approach from Vitaly Bragilevsky at his Lambdaconf talk this year. But I've been unable to find any documentation about it.

Best regards, Sam

...

On 22 August 2018 at 12:30, Ben Gamari wrote: In general we don't support bootstrapping older GHCI with newer GHC. However, you may be able to hack something together by manually tweaking bounds.

Cheers,

- Ben

-- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users

---

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Hi Ben, This would definitely help. I could use a docker image of a really old OS that has old ghc binaries available, to generate the .c for that old version of GHC (e.g. v 7.0 or something). Then I could use those files to bootstrap a ghc 7.0 on my machine, and from there every version of ghc since. It would make a lot of sense for the "unregistered" sources to be made available as an optional download alongside the source code, if haskell.org were open to that possibility. Best regards, Sam On 22 August 2018 at 21:20, Ben Gamari wrote:

Indeed, GHC can indeed produce (very slow) C. This is known as unregisterised mode [1]. That being said, I'm not sure that helps you with the task at hand. Afterall, you still would need a haskell compiler to build your unregisterised compiler.

[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Unregisterised

On August 22, 2018 12:12:27 PM EDT, Sam Halliday wrote:

...

Hi Tom,

I'm not sure it is necessary to go back that far. Vitaly pointed out that any version of GHC could produce the "minimal C" output, which can be ported to another platform that doesn't have a GHC, as the bootstrap. I'm not entirely sure how to generate that output, mind you.

On 22 August 2018 at 17:05, wrote:

...

(I haven't actually done this, but:) If you want to be able to install GHC without any GHC binary, I think you'd have to start with an ancient version of GHC which wasn't itself written in Haskell, and build successive versions (skipping as many as possible) until you had a GHC which supported all the language features the most-recent version requires.

If you did embark on this, it would be nice if you could report back with a minimal number of steps it takes to get to current GHC!

Tom

...

El 22 ago 2018, a las 06:01, Sam Halliday escribió:

Hi Ben,

What is the recommended way to build old versions of GHC? The haskell.org binaries for, e.g. 7.8.3, do not work on my machine. If I attempt to recompile ghc 7.8.3 with the haskell.org binary, I get linkage errors.

Actually I'd love to be able to bootstrap a build without any ghc installed... that would solve the problem. I heard about the "phase0" approach from Vitaly Bragilevsky at his Lambdaconf talk this year. But I've been unable to find any documentation about it.

Best regards, Sam

...

On 22 August 2018 at 12:30, Ben Gamari wrote: In general we don't support bootstrapping older GHCI with newer GHC. However, you may be able to hack something together by manually tweaking bounds.

Cheers,

- Ben

-- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. ________________________________

Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users

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Hi Ben, Updating the new build tool is e right thing to do, long term, but it unfortunate doesn't help with my objective of compiling old versions of ghc ... but there is a quick here that I could exploit. Since I'm building for the same platform, bug just using different versions of the operating system, I think I can create the C files in an old Debian inside docker and use them in the more modern host machine to build the old ghc. On Fri, 31 Aug 2018, 15:36 Ben Gamari, wrote:

Sam Halliday writes:

...

Hi Ben,

This would definitely help. I could use a docker image of a really old OS that has old ghc binaries available, to generate the .c for that old version of GHC (e.g. v 7.0 or something). Then I could use those files to bootstrap a ghc 7.0 on my machine, and from there every version of ghc since. It would make a lot of sense for the "unregistered" sources to be made available as an optional download alongside the source code, if haskell.org were open to that possibility.

This is a very interesting idea. The build system currently isn't really setup in a way to make this possible, but this could likely be changed in our new build system, Hadrian. Also, I suspect this would require some adjustments to the C code generator, which very likely has some platform dependence in its output.

Perhaps you'd like to try picking up this task?

Cheers,

- Ben