Simon Marlow wrote:
Andrew Coppin wrote:
Looking at the surface, it appears as if not very much is currently going on with GHC. And then, by pure chance, I happened across a link that allows you to access the GHC developers' mailing list, and woooooo-boy, it looks pretty damned busy in there! o_O
There's nothing closed about the GHC developer list - feel free to join, or just read it from the archives or GMane.
I feel my IQ is far too low for that. ;-) [Not to mention that the traffic volume looks insane...]
On the subject of DLLs, there's an important distinction to make.
1. putting the whole program/library in a DLL that you can call from C
2. putting individual Haskell packages in DLLs that you can call from Haskell.
(1) has always been supported (temporary breakage notwithstanding) and as far as I know will work in 6.10.1. (2) was supported a long time ago for a short while, and we'd like to bring it back, but as part of a multi-platform effort to support shared libraries.
To get (1) you just do ghc -shared, I believe (I'm not by a Windows machine right now so can't check).
(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...?) (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? Also, I read somewhere that you are/were looking at making the RTS into a DLL. What's the status with that? 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... ;-)