GHC Weekly News - 2015/03/10

thoughtpolice - 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 for class 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.