GHC Weekly News - 2014/12/16

thoughtpolice - 2014-12-16

Hi *,

time for another piece of the GHC weekly news!

• Joachim Breitner has gotten the new GHC 7.8.4 package to tentatively build on ARM quite easily for Debian. Austin also took the liberty of merging all the needed patches; they’ll be part of the 7.8.4 release https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-December/007608.html

• Greg Weber announced he’s taken the time to set up a Docker image for GHC development - if you’re on Linux, Greg’s image should help you get up to speed with a GHC development environment in minutes! https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-December/007606.html

• Lennart Kolmodin has spent time working on autocompletion for GHC, and 7.10 will ship with bash completion scripts - which package maintainers and distributions can now ship for their users. Thank you Lennart! https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-December/007614.html

• Adam Gundry has a question about the new type checker plugin infrastructure; in particular - how do we deal with the serialization of type checker evidence that plugins may want to create or pass around on their own? Richard, Simon and Iavor weigh in. https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-December/007626.html

• For the past few days, Richard Eisenberg has been hunting a performance regression in the compiler. After profiling, discussion on IRC and elsewhere, Richard has finally made some headway, and discovered one of the ‘hot spots’ in his patch. Unfortunately the battle isn’t quite over just yet, and the hunt for a few more % increase remains. https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-December/007645.html

• David Spies has hit a very strange situation with GHC 7.8.3 running out of memory. But it turned out this was a change in 7.8, in relation to how stacks were managed. Phew! https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-December/007646.html

• Austin made a final call for 7.8.4 bugfixes. He plans on making the final release this week, if nobody has any other major complaints. https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-December/007684.html

Finally, in a slight change, we’ll also be covering some notes from this week’s meeting between GHC HQ (Austin, Simon PJ, SimonM, Herbert and Mikolaj), including…

• The 7.10 RC1 looks like it’s scheduled to occur this week still; all of our libraries and submodules are up-to-date, and we’ve taken the time to alert all of our maintainers about this. Thanks to Herbert for taking control of this!

• We’ll soon be implementing a new ‘push hook’ for the ghc.git repository: no more trailing whitespace. Since we’ve recently detabbed, and de-lhs-ified the tree, a knock-on effect was deleting trailing whitespace. Now that we’ve done a lot of this, we should take the time to enforce it - so they can’t slip back in.

• Austin will be landing Phab:D169 and Phab:D396 soon to get it into 7.10.1 RC1.

• This week, Austin managed to secure two sponsors for GHC/Haskell.org. We’ve been given a wonderful set of ARM buildbots (running in the cloud!) and a new, incredibly powerful POWER8 machine to use (with over 170 hardware threads available, for scalability testing). Hooray for our friends at Online.net and RunAbove.com for helping us out!

Closed tickets this week include: #9871, #9808, #9870, #9605, #9874, #9872, #9090, #9404, #8240, #9567, #9566, #9583, #9117, #9882, #9884, #9372, #7942, #8951, #9817, #9620, #9336, #9523, #9552, #8988, #9390, #9415, #9371, #7143, #9563, #8778, #4428, #4896, #9393, #9169, #7015, #8943, #8621, #9132, #9857, #8024, #9831, and #9888.