Thanks for your response, I'll follow your saga and hopefully learn a bit more about GHC's guts in the process. On 07/05/2006, at 4:05 AM, Reilly Hayes wrote:
You'll get a better response to this on the glasgow-haskell-users list. I'm cross-posting my reply.
I'm brand new to hacking on GHC, but I've been working on this in my pitifully meagre spare time. The actual expert is Wolfgang Thaller, but he doesn't seem to be around the lists lately. I was able to generate hc files on a 386 linux box (actually on a Parallels virtual machine on my mac, as my linux boxen all run 64 bit linuces). I'll share my findings so far:
1) STABLE does not have the appropriate code in the Mangler to deal with Darwin/86. I've been playing with various versions of HEAD.
2) HEAD has gone through a major revision to the directory structure. The documentation and some of the build processes have not caught up. Simon Marlow sent a helpful e-mail to the ghc users list a few days ago that you should look at.
3) Building the .hc files mostly requires the appropriate settings in mk/build.mk on the Host (linux) machine. I'll include my build.mk below. There is a target in the top level makefile called hc-file-bundle (which needs to be invoked with the parameter ProjectNameShort=ghc in HEAD and Project=ghc in STABLE). This target packages up the .hc files, but does not build them. Some of the .hc files in utils (genapply, genprimopcode, & ghc-pkg) don't get built. I just cd to the directories and make them by hand (be sure to use the in-place compiler). A GhcUtilsHcOpts variable in the make structure would be nice (in order to pass -keep-hc-files to ghc when building these on the host).
4) I have been working with Registerised hc files. This may have been a mistake, as registerised code seems to present some unique challenges on Darwin/86. See the items below for a discussion.
5) If I understand correctly (somebody with better knowledge please correct me), there is a register allocation conflict between ghc and relocatable code generated by gcc on the 386 (gcc flag -fPIC). This limits ghc to producing static binaries. The gcc in Xcode builds relocatable code by default and requires -static to build static binaries.
I think this conflict is limited to code that goes through the Mangler (registerized code).
6) If I understand correctly, there is code in the RTS that cannot be built using the native code generator. Which suggests that we're stuck with static binaries. There is a ticket to fix this in HEAD.
7) Mac OS X really doesn't like static binaries. In fact, in order to link a static binary, you have to go to opendarwin and download the Csu package to build crt0.o. It's not included in any of the development tools. Apple warns that static binaries are likely to fail to operate in O/S version changes.
Curently I'm fighting with the Makefiles to figure out how to get the -static flag stuffed into all of the invocations of gcc. Some of the invocations in rts components don't seem to obey the normal variables used in the makefile structure. I haven't had time to puzzle this out and won't for a few days.
mk/build.mk used to generate hc files:
GhcLibHcOpts = -O -fasm -keep-hc-files GhcRtsHcOpts = -fasm -keep-hc-files GhcWithInterpreter = NO GhcStage1HcOpts = -O GhcStage2HcOpts = -O -fasm -keep-hc-files SRC_HC_OPTS += -H32m
-reilly hayes
On May 5, 2006, at 7:34 PM, Scott Weeks wrote:
Hi All,
Does anyone know if there's been any headway on this? If there's not a port available, where do I go about finding the hc files? Could I compile on a windows or linux x86 box and use the generated hc files to bootstrap?
Cheers, Scott
On 22/03/2006, at 7:09 AM, Deling Ren wrote:
Hi there,
Has anyone made any attempt to port GHC to Mac OS X on x86? Wolfgang Thaller’s binary package runs over Rosetta but slow (not surprising). It can not be used to compile a native version either (I got some errors related to machine registers).
I tried to do a bootstrap but can't find the ".HC" files mentioned in the manual. They don't seem to be on the download page of GHC. Any ideas?
Thanks.
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Reilly Hayes rfh@reillyhayes.com