raspberrypi and ghci

Vasili I. Galchin

8 Mar 2015 8 Mar '15

3:24 a.m.

Hello, I have a B++ pi. I did a "apt-get install haskell-platform. No " ghci"!. So I did a google on this issue. Circa 2013 ghci seemed to be an issue with raspberrypi/arm. What is the current status of "ghci" on the pi/arm??. Vasili

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Ben Gamari

8 Mar 8 Mar

12:43 p.m.

"Vasili I. Galchin" writes:

...

Hello,

I have a B++ pi. I did a "apt-get install haskell-platform. No " ghci"!. So I did a google on this issue. Circa 2013 ghci seemed to be an issue with raspberrypi/arm. What is the current status of "ghci" on the pi/arm??.

With dynamic linking and the LLVM backend GHC 7.8 is quite usable on ARM. Unfortunately, much of the distributions' packaging hasn't been updated to reflect this. Debian builds in experimental (starting with 7.8.20141119-8) now build GHCi on ARM; it may take a while for this to propagate to Raspbian. When I have more bandwidth I'll see if we might be able to start providing some unofficial Debian builds for ARM platforms. Cheers, - Ben

Vasili I. Galchin

10 Mar 10 Mar

1:14 a.m.

Hi Ben, Cabal also doesn't seem to be supported on raspberrypi?? What is the URL of your group that is porting Haskell to the raspberrypi? Vasili On Sunday, March 8, 2015, Ben Gamari wrote:

...

"Vasili I. Galchin" javascript:;> writes:

...
Hello,

I have a B++ pi. I did a "apt-get install haskell-platform. No " ghci"!. So I did a google on this issue. Circa 2013 ghci seemed to be an issue with raspberrypi/arm. What is the current status of "ghci" on the pi/arm??.

With dynamic linking and the LLVM backend GHC 7.8 is quite usable on ARM. Unfortunately, much of the distributions' packaging hasn't been updated to reflect this. Debian builds in experimental (starting with 7.8.20141119-8) now build GHCi on ARM; it may take a while for this to propagate to Raspbian. When I have more bandwidth I'll see if we might be able to start providing some unofficial Debian builds for ARM platforms.

Cheers,

- Ben

Ben Gamari

9:38 a.m.

"Vasili I. Galchin" writes:

...

Hi Ben,

Hi Vasili!

...

Cabal also doesn't seem to be supported on raspberrypi??

Cabal should run perfectly well on as should most pure Haskell libraries found on Hackage. Cabal is packaged for Debian under the name `cabal-install`.

...

What is the URL of your group that is porting Haskell to the raspberrypi?

It's not so much an organized group as a few loosely-coupled individual GHC developers interested in ensuring GHC is well-supported on ARM (Cc'd; apologies if I have forgotten someone). While the Raspberry Pi should work, I don't know of any developers who actively test on it due to its quite anemic specifications; even on my four-core Odroid XU a GHC build takes much of the day. There have been a few issues [1,2] specific to the pre-ARMv6 (e.g. quite old) ARM core that the Raspberry Pi uses but I believe these have been sorted out (unfortunately #9125 will still be present in GHC 7.10 as it is apparentlly an LLVM bug). The GHC-on-ARM effort doesn't have a website per-se. I occassionally write around related issues on my blog [3,4]. The GHC Wiki has some relevant material, although it can be difficult to tell what is out-of-date. The mailing lists and issue tracker are good repositories for knowledge when things go awry. I think it is fair to say that much of the compiler engineering work is done and stable; the GHC 7.8 builds on my ARM boxes are just as functional as my x86_64-based laptop. Most of the issues we have encountered arose from bugs in external components of the compilation process (linkers, in particular, are problematic) and maintaining the LLVM backend (which should improve notably with GHC 7.12 which will support only one LLVM release). All of the developers mentioned above are available on IRC (#ghc on Freenode) and the ghc-devs mailing list. If you run in to trouble don't hesitate to contact me. Cheers, - Ben [1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9125 [2] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8951 [3] http://smart-cactus.org/~ben/posts/2014-03-06-compiling-ghc-7.8-on-arm.html [4] http://smart-cactus.org/~ben/posts/2014-11-28-state-of-llvm-backend.html

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Ben Gamari
Vasili I. Galchin