Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
Hello Andrew,
Sunday, July 8, 2007, 9:40:15 PM, you wrote:
I've asked this before and nobody answered, so I take it that nobody knows the answer... Does GHC *ever* do an in-place update on anything?
no. this will break GC's heart :)
Yeah, having only immutable objects to collect must simplify a whole bunch of stuff...
and it really breaks it as far as you start to work with updateable arrays. look for details at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Modern_array_libraries
"GHC 6.6 (currently in beta testing) will add..." Oh, that's cute. ;-)
Does the STG even have a command for that?
hm. there are ghc primitives that work with mutable arrays. look for primops.txt.pp in ghc sources.
The GHC sources. Scary place. ;-) I did think about compiling GHC myself once. But then I found out that it's not actually written in Haskell - it's written in Haskell + C + asm + Perl (?!) and it's utterly *huge*...
btw, you doesn't need to use unix in order to play with ghc HEAD - you can download compiled windows binary
Seriously? I'm pretty sure I tried to do that and couldn't...