On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Simon Marlow wrote:

...

I don't know enough about ODIN to be able to usefully comment, apart from to say that extra layers of translation generally add extra layers of complication (we've had no end of trouble with cygwin/mingw on Win32), and in this case you'd be going through 2 layers (mingw + ODIN) which could well be more trouble than it's worth.

ODIN will (might) allow me to run the Win32 GHC executable under OS/2 (ODIN implements the win32 api and comes with a PE loader) (ODIN is Wine for OS/2). I thought this might be useful to help bootstrap the compalation of GHC under OS/2, because I'd wind up with a Haskell complier (although one that produces windows executables). Maybe I'll hold off on such an approach until (or if) it become clear that such a venture would be useful.

Interesting - you might be able to bootstrap this way. The idea would be to run the Win32 compiler under ODIN but persuade it to compile via C using your EMX gcc - hence generating EMX object files. This is good because you can start by just compiling up the RTS and libraries, and test that the compiler is producing working binaries before going on to bootstrap a native compiler. I would go straight for a "registerised" port, since you're on x86 and have gcc. Some minor hacking will likely be required to the mangler (ghc/driver/mangler/ghc-asm.lprl) and one or two bits of the RTS. Cheers, Simon