GHC Weekly News - 2015/03/24
Hi *,
It's time for the GHC weekly news. We've had an absence of the last one, mostly due to a lot of hustle to try and get 7.10 out the door (more on that shortly throughout this post). But now we're back and everything seems to be taken care of.
This week, in the wake of the GHC 7.10 release (which is occuring EOD, hopefully), GHC HQ met up for a brief chat and caught up:
- This week GHC HQ met for only a very short time to discuss the pending release - it looks like all the blocking bugs have been fixed, and we've got everything triaged appropriately. You'll hopefully see the 7.10 announcement shortly after reading this.
We've also had small amounts of list activity (the past 6-8 weeks have been very, very quiet it seems):
- Your editor sent out a call for developers to fill information in on the Status page about what they plan to do. If you're working on something, please add it there! https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008661.html
- Herbert Valerio Riedel asked about a possible regression regarding identifiers containing unicode subscripts - but nobody has replied! https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008503.html
- Doug Burke chimed in as a new contributor and wrote down some notes on what it took to write his first patch and submit it to us - and we really appreciate the feedback, Doug! https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008526.html
- Yitzchak Gale revived a thread he started a while back, which puttered out: bootstrapping GHC 7.8 with GHC 7.10. The long and short of it is, it should just about work - although we still haven't committed to this policy, it looks like Yitz and some others are quite adamant about it. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008531.html
- Neil Mitchell uncovered a nasty bug in GHC 7.10.1 RC3, submitted it to us. He also wrote a fantastic blog post explaining the issue. And it was promply diagnosed, fixed, and taken care of by our own Joachim Breitner. Thank you for the fast response Joachim and Neil! https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008532.html
- Mark Lentczner has announced Alpha releases of the Haskell Platform 2015.2.0.0, containing GHC 7.10.1 RC3: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008597.html
- Simon Peyton Jones asks: what's the current state about having simultaneous installations of a package? Simon is a bit confused as to why this is still a problem when we have all the tools to solve it, it looks like! (But read on for more): https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008602.html
- Michael Snoyman asks: can we get a new feature patch in GHC 7.10.2? The answer seems to be an unfortunate 'no', but with some tips, Michael may end up backporting the changes from HEAD to GHC 7.10 himself. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008612.html
Some noteworthy commits that went into ghc.git
in the past two weeks include:
- Commit 71fcc4c096ec0b575522e4c2d0104ef7a71a13c5 - GHC defaults to using the
gold
linker on ARM/Android and ARM/Linux targets. - Commit 9dfdd16a61e79cb03c633d442190a81fe5c0b6b8 - Bump
ghc-prim
to version 0.4.0.0. - Commit 42448e3757f25735a0a5b5e2b7ee456b5e8b0039 - GHC HEAD now always looks for LLVM 3.6 specifically.
Closed tickets this past week include: #9122, #10099, #10081, #9886, #9722, #9619, #9920, #9691, #8976, #9873, #9541, #9619, #9799, #9823, #10156, #1820, #6079, #9056, #9963, #10164, #10138, #10166, #10115, #9921, #9873, #9956, #9609, #7191, #10165, #10011, #8379, #10177, #9261, #10176, #10151, #9839, #8078, #8727, #9849, #10146, #9194, #10158, #7788, #9554, #8550, #10079, #10139, #10180, #10181, #10170, #10186, #10038, #10164, and #8976.
GHC Weekly News - 2015/03/10
Hi *,
It's that time again! Today GHC HQ met on a Tuesday to avoid some scheduling conflicts, and that means it's time to send some news to people.
Just a quick reminder from last week: we're hoping to make our third GHC 7.10.1 release candidate on Friday, March 13th, with the final release on Friday, March 27th.
- Today, GHC HQ mostly talked about 7.10 bugs; HEAD is steaming along as usual with no impediments, but we've got several critical bugs we plan on landing fixes for this week; see milestone:7.10.1 for more.
But we've also had a little more list activity this week than we did before:
- Joachim Breitner asks: how do I extend the blocks in a C-- graph? Jan popped in with advice, but it looks like Joachim found a rather simple solution himself. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008467.html
- Karel Gardas wrote to the list about how to better parallelize the GHC build. For background, he's using a UltraSPARC T1-CPU/T2000 server with 32 hardware threads over 8 cores, where parallelism is a bigger win than raw single-threaded performance. But despite that, the performance is of the parallel GHC build is relatively abysmal - and Karel wants help brainstorming ideas to fix it. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008474.html
- Herbert Valerio Riedel noted that there are new git hooks in place for all developers on
git.haskell.org
, which will reject new kinds of pushes. In particular, Herbert took the time to implement commit message validation, and whitespace validation. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008480.html
Some noteworthy commits that went into ghc.git
in the past week include:
- Commit eb3661f2b9f8472f3714774126ebe1183484dd85 - Re-export
<$>
from Prelude (#10113)
- Commit 479523f3c37894d63352f1718e06696f3ed63143 - Re-export
<$
from Prelude (#10113)
- Commit b359c886cd7578ed083bcedcea05d315ecaeeb54 - Custom
Typeable
solver, that keeps track of kinds (#9858)
- Commit 76b1e11943d794da61d342c072a783862a9e2a1a - Improve core linter so it catches
unsafeCoerce
problems (#9122)
- Commit 7a2d65a4d93273c89fbb1d19e282d5933c67c7ca - Define proper
MINIMAL
pragma forclass Ix
(#10142)
Closed tickets the past week include: #7854, #10118, #10119, #3321, #10132, #9987, #10126, #9707, #10142, #10147, #10113, #9524, #10058, #10100, #2991, #10140, and #9122.
GHC Weekly News - 2015/03/03
Hi *,
It's that time again! Today GHC HQ met on a Tuesday to avoid some scheduling conflicts, and that means it's time to send some news to people.
Just a quick reminder from last week: we're hoping to make our third GHC 7.10.1 release candidate on Friday, March 13th, with the final release on Friday, March 27th.
Today, GHC HQ met up and mostly discussed the current status of GHC 7.10 and its bugs, which you can find on the Status page: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.1
But we've also had a little more list activity this week than we did before:
- Simon PJ showed up to tell everyone he'd be a bit busy due to upcoming ICFP deadlines! However, since it's passed as of last Friday, it looks like the coming weeks will be more normal. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-February/008420.html
- Michael Snoyman started a thread about a serious bug that has eluded attention during the 7.10 RC period:
cabal haddock --hoogle
does not work! https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-February/008412.html
- Jan Bracker is working on using the new type-checking plugins infrastructure, and had a question about the usage of what the typechecker calls
EvTerms
. Adam swooped in to respond. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-February/008414.html
- Ben Gamari has been working on #9661, but while trying to do so hit a very painful set of conditions due to the import dependency graph of the compiler, making his fix much more difficult. Simon responds with his thoughts. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008432.html
- After returning from an ICFP-writing-induced hiatus, Simon alerted us to a new paper of his describing his new, GADT-aware pattern matching checker. As usual, he'd love comments! The implementation will hopefully land in HEAD soon. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008437.html
- Nikita Karetnikov was kind enough to alert the list that he's gotten a nice, Nix/NixOS based solution to building GHC, which he's documented on the wiki. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008445.html
Some noteworthy commits that went into ghc.git
in the past week include:
- Commit aead01902e1c41e85b758dbafd15e60d08956374 - the
-fwarn-unused-binds
warning was split into 3 warnings, fixing #17 (one of our oldest open tickets).
- Commit 5be8ed4da1963ed2d45a65fb61d761c977707cce - restores
integer-gmp
compatibility with GMP 4.x. This will be part of GHC 7.10.
- Commit 31d4f2e9c89e22a91f98b4a4aa0f80af6b07b60f -
make test
in the top-level directory now works as expected.
- Commit 5200bdeb26c5ec98739b14b10fc8907296bceeb9 - Replace Windows SEH handlers with VEH handlers, working uniformly across x86 and x86_64.
Closed tickets the past week include: #9586, #10122, #10026, #8896, #10090, #10123, #10128, #10025, #10024, #10125, #9994, #9962, #10103, #10112, #10122, #9901, #10130, #10129, #9044, #8342, #8780, #10003, #17, #2530, #8274, and #10107.