GHC Weekly News - 2015/03/03

thoughtpolice - 2015-03-04

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.