On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 9:05 AM, Alan & Kim Zimmerman wrote:

Perhaps it makes sense to scan hackage to find all the different CPP idioms that are actually used in Haskell code, if it is a small/well-defined set it may be worth writing a simple custom preprocessor.

Conditional imports are far and away the most commonly used idiom. Second most common, I'd say, is specifying GHC-specific vs compiler-generic implementations of top-level functions (e.g., using GHC.Exts.build or not). For both of these it's sufficient to have the #if construction plus everything needed for the conditional expressions. However, while the #if construction covers the vast majority of use cases, it doesn't cover all of them. Macros are also important. For example, a number of low-level libraries will use macros for things like having assertions which are either compiled as runtime checks, or as nothing, depending on a Cabal flag. Of course, there are plenty of other places where we want to use macros in low-level code, either to force inlining, or to have conditional compilation of (non-top-level) expressions that show up over and over. That these idioms aren't more common is just because there aren't more people working on such low-level code. In theory TH should be able to handle this stuff, but TH is a verbose sledgehammer for these sorts of problems, and using TH means restricting yourself to being GHC-only. -- Live well, ~wren