Simon Marlow wrote:
Andrew Coppin wrote:
(1) is not of huge interest to me, but it's pleasing to know that it's possible. (I don't actually know how DLLs work, but presumably if I were to dig around in System.Win32 I could also call normal DLLs from Haskell too if I desire...?)
Sure, that's possible.
Though non-portable. Of course, system-specific things being system-specific is kind of beyond Haskell's ability to fix. ;-)
(2) is something I'd like to see - and I aplaud you for seeking to make this a portable thing! (As well it should be.) One or other of the developer wiki pages lists this as "things we'll definitely do for 6.10"; can you confirm or refute that?
It's one of several things we quite get done in time for 6.10.1, I'll edit that page.
Aww... :-( Oh well, I'm sure we'll get it eventually. Up to date documentation is always nice though! (I realise this isn't always a busy development team's top priority - especially as release dates approach, etc.)
Also, I read somewhere that you are/were looking at making the RTS into a DLL. What's the status with that?
That's part of the same effort. Once Haskell packages can go into DLLs/shared libraries, the RTS can too (indeed, it probably has to).
Would that mean you can change between RTS versions just by supplying a command switch? (Presumably a small portion of the RTS still gets statically linked in so it knows to load a DLL from somewhere?) Or does the RTS version you want to use affect the rest of the compilation process? (I'm thinking of switching between threaded/nonthreaded RTS, stuff like that.) I presume the plan is to make shared libraries *optional*? As in, you can still build statically-linked executables if you specifically wanted to for some strange reason? (Also, I presume you still need a *.hi file to compile any code against a library, no matter what the linkage is, and then cross-module optimisation will still happen. The versioning problem looks... interesting.)
Given that I know virtually nothing about how such low-level things work, and I have no clue how GHC works internally, is there anything useful I can do to help you guys with this stuff? I mean, other than complaining that it's not done yet... ;-)
Help with testing and reporting bugs is always welcome! Ee'll announce something when it's ready to test.
Heh, OK. Well I gather Windows testers are rare round here. I'll try compiling things if you want... ;-) Actually, you have a beta for 6.10 already, right?