On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Francesco Mazzoli wrote:

No, it is not possible to build GHC without GHC. Building GHC on ARM is going to be extremely tricky (I'm not sure anyone has ever done it).

I used to use an unregistered build of GHC built by someone in the Debian community - it worked well enough. Cheers, Thomas

What you should be able to do easily with the next release is cross-compile to ARM through the LLVM backend.

Francesco.

On 08/04/12 23:28, . wrote:

...

Hi Cafe, I hope this is the right place to ask this kind of stuff. I would like to try ghc on a panda board (armv7l) with arch linux. There is apparently no pre-built package, so I was trying the instructions to build, from here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Porting.

However, I still seem to need a ghc and ghc-pkg installed: I am getting this error message: .... checking for tar... /bin/tar checking for gpatch... no checking for patch... /usr/bin/patch checking for dtrace... no checking for HsColour... no checking for xmllint... no configure: WARNING: cannot find xmllint in your PATH, you will not be able to validate your documentation checking for xsltproc... no configure: WARNING: cannot find xsltproc in your PATH, you will not be able to build the HTML documentation checking for dblatex... no configure: WARNING: cannot find dblatex in your PATH, you will not be able to build the PDF and PS documentation checking for ghc-pkg matching ... configure: error: Cannot find matching ghc-pkg

---------

Does anyone know if it is possible to build ghc without ghc on this platform? I was using the tarball sources for ghc 7.4.1.

Thanks, Christian

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On 09/04/2012 00:45, Joey Hess wrote:

Thomas DuBuisson wrote:

...

On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Francesco Mazzoli wrote:

...

No, it is not possible to build GHC without GHC. Building GHC on ARM is going to be extremely tricky (I'm not sure anyone has ever done it).

I used to use an unregistered build of GHC built by someone in the Debian community - it worked well enough.

It ships with Debian, along with the full Haskell Platform built for ARM and lots of other libraries. Other than speed, it's fine.

Hmmm... I wonder if it will squeeze onto a Raspberry Pi :) #g --

Other than speed, it's fine.

Do we know what speed issues are due to? Plus, I believed some had used GHC for smartphones? Le 9 avril 2012 01:45, Joey Hess a écrit :

Thomas DuBuisson wrote:

...

On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 4:03 PM, Francesco Mazzoli wrote:

...

No, it is not possible to build GHC without GHC. Building GHC on ARM is going to be extremely tricky (I'm not sure anyone has ever done it).

I used to use an unregistered build of GHC built by someone in the Debian community - it worked well enough.

It ships with Debian, along with the full Haskell Platform built for ARM and lots of other libraries. Other than speed, it's fine.

-- see shy jo

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For instance, yes. I think I had seen some times on this mailing list or on blog posts ( http://ghcarm.wordpress.com/) people having used GHC on ARM platform. I distinctly remember having seen on the mailing list that cross-compiling wasn't working but that we now can compile with GHC on ARM, which means GHC can be compiled for ARM. Le 10 avril 2012 12:27, Joachim Breitner a écrit :

Hi,

Am Dienstag, den 10.04.2012, 11:00 +0200 schrieb Yves Parès:

...

Plus, I believed some had used GHC for smartphones?

do you refer to

http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/archives/300-Xmonad-on-my-mobile-phone.h... or something more serious?

Greetings, Joachim

-- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de | nomeata@debian.org | GPG: 0x4743206C xmpp: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://www.joachim-breitner.de/

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All these are not cross-compiled, but natively compiled on the repective architecture, and I don’t think it is easily possible to cross-compile GHC itself even today.

So how did they get compiled the first time? How do you get a GHC working on *or* for an ARM platform if you don't use Debian? And why was Joey Hess talking about performance issues? (I'll be eventually interested, as Graham Klyne suggested earlier, in compiling for Raspberry Pi, if the hardware suits). Le 10 avril 2012 12:49, Joachim Breitner a écrit :

Hi,

Am Dienstag, den 10.04.2012, 12:36 +0200 schrieb Yves Parès:

...

For instance, yes. I think I had seen some times on this mailing list or on blog posts (http://ghcarm.wordpress.com/) people having used GHC on ARM platform. I distinctly remember having seen on the mailing list that cross-compiling wasn't working but that we now can compile with GHC on ARM, which means GHC can be compiled for ARM.

I’m not sure what the news are here: Debian has provided ghc6 on arm at least since Debian etch in 2006 (GHC 6.6), and the first Debian release with ghc6 (Debian sarge) ships it on alpha hppa i386 ia64 m68k powerpc s390 and sparc (GHC 6.2). All these are not cross-compiled, but natively compiled on the repective architecture, and I don’t think it is easily possible to cross-compile GHC itself even today. (All data from http://archive.debian.net/)

Greetings, Joachim

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Okay, thanks for the explanation. But that does not completely answer the original question: now, using branch 7 of GHC what can you do to get a haskell program compiled on/for an ARM platform without using Debian? You have to use LLVM? So you have to compile your program on a regular x86/x64 PC for LLVM backend and then use that bytecode on your ARM platform, is that it? Is LLVM bytecode that portable? I don't much about LLVM, so sorry if those questions feel a bit dumb ;) ghcarm speaks about the Pandaboard and LLVM in a post: http://ghcarm.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/llvm-on-arm-testing And thanks for the information about git-annex, I'm checking that out, it looks interesting ;) Actually, bottomline I would be interested in running a web app (preferably using Yesod) on a Raspberry Pi (or similar, but more expensive), but this use case is cool too. Le 10 avril 2012 13:13, Joachim Breitner a écrit :

Hi,

Am Dienstag, den 10.04.2012, 13:04 +0200 schrieb Yves Parès:

...

...

All these are not cross-compiled, but natively compiled on the repective architecture, and I don’t think it is easily possible to cross-compile GHC itself even today.

So how did they get compiled the first time? How do you get a GHC working on or for an ARM platform if you don't use Debian? And why was Joey Hess talking about performance issues? (I'll be eventually interested, as Graham Klyne suggested earlier, in compiling for Raspberry Pi, if the hardware suits).

well, GHC was more portable in version 6.8 and before (this is not cross-compiling, at least not really: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Porting

When I ported GHC to s390x half a year ago, I think I started with porting 6.8 and then kept building the next released version with the previous. It would be great, though, if porting current versions directly would become possible again.

Most of these architectures do not have a native code generator (so they are compiled via C) and are unregisterized, i.e. GHC knows nothing about their registers. Both cause a performance penalty; I don’t know numbers. I assume this is what Joey refers to. But maybe also that ARM machines tend to be slower :-)

I’m happily running git-annex on a NSLU2 (266MHz/23MB RAM ARM NAS device) and have done so before it was registerized, so it is definitely a useful target for Haskell.

Greetings, Joachim

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On 04/10/12 07:03 PM, Joey Hess wrote:

BTW, the other problem with Haskell on arm is that AFAIK there is no ghci, and so also no Template Haskell, and so if you're writing Real World utilities that you want to be maximally portable, this means you have to avoid using an increasing number of libraries. This rules Yesod right out; I've avoided using lenses as I'd have to write much manual boilerplate, etc.

Ben Gamari already submitted his ARM/Linker support so GHCi is already kind of working, i.e. is built but at least on my setup still fails on majority of tests so there are still some outstanding issues probably. Anyway, things are moving forward... Karel

On 04/ 9/12 01:03 AM, Francesco Mazzoli wrote:

No, it is not possible to build GHC without GHC. Building GHC on ARM is going to be extremely tricky (I'm not sure anyone has ever done it).

It's not that tricky at the end. Just install LLVM 3.0 and some OS supplied unregisterised GHC. Grab 7.4.1. sources and attempt to compile. This should produce even registerised build for you as a result of project initiated last summer by Stephen Blackheath. If you are curious about its history read some posts on http://ghcarm.wordpress.com/ Cheers, Karel