GHC Weekly News - 2015/04/14

thoughtpolice - 2015-04-14

Hi *,

It’s been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - your editor apologizes about that. It’s actually been a relatively slow few weeks here too, and busy-ness outside of GHC has attracted some of my attention. Despite that, GHC 7.10.1 was released, a new HP alpha is out, and things are moving along smoothly. Now that the release is done, things are quitely moving along in HEAD - with people committing code with reckless abandon, of course.

This week, GHC HQ met up, but it’s been very light since the 7.10.1 release. Currently there isn’t anything pushing us to do a 7.10.2 release at least for a few more weeks it looks like - but see below.

  • We puzzled a bit about the release status of 7.10.2, and thought: it’s only holding up people who are depending on it. So, who’s depending on it, and what do they need fixed? See below for more.

  • We also talked a bit about performance - it seems the compiler has been getting much slower over time since the 7.8.x release series, and it’s time to reign it in. Austin will be spending his week investigating a bit of this, and the causes.

7.10.2 Status

So, you may be wondering when the 7.10.2 release is. The trick is it happens when you tell us it should happen!

So far, taking a look at milestone:7.10.2, we’ve fixed about half the bugs we currently have marked down to fix. But we’re probably going to punt some of those - and we’re not sure all the ones that are there should be.

So this is a call: If you need something to be fixed during 7.10.2, please file a ticket, set the milestone, and alert us. The sooner the better, because it’ll inform us as to when we should release. Emailing ghc-devs@haskell.org is also a sure-fire way to get our attention.

And remember: you can always find out the latest about the next release at the Status page (in this case, for 7.10.2) - https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.2

Call for help: DocBook to AsciiDoc

The GHC team needs some help. A few months ago, we put out a poll to convert our DocBook-based manual to AsciiDoc.

The poll had a mostly lukewarm reception, with the idea that it will A) make life easier for people who frequently modify the users guide, and B) make life easier for people who add things irregularly, as a lower barrier to entry.

It looks like we still want to do this - but alas, many of us don’t have time!

So, we’re asking the public: Is anyone willing to step up and help here? For example, it may be possible to get a long ways with just pandoc, but we need someone to finish it - and in return, we’ll help along the way!

List chatter

Noteworthy commits

  • Commit de1160be047790afde4ec76de0a81ba3be0c73fa - refactor the story around switch cases (with a code-size improvement)

  • Commit 995e8c1c8692b60c907c7d2ccea179d52ca8e69e - drop old integer-gmp-0.5 source code.

  • Commit 59f7a7b6091e9c0564f3f370d09398d8c9cd8ad5 - Restore unwind information generation (fixes DWARF generation)

  • Commit 9f0f99fd41ff82cc223d3b682703e508efb564d2 - Fix an old bug in the demand analyzer (with some nice compiler performance boosts).

  • Commit a7524eaed33324e2155c47d4a705bef1d70a2b5b - Support for multiple signature files in scope (Backpack).

Closed tickets

#10222, #10219, #8057, #10226, #10220, #9723, #10230, #10208, #10236, #10213, #10231, #10240, #10243, #10237, #10224, #8811, #10197, #10252, #9958, #10253, #8248, #10207, #10214, #9964, #10194, #10251, #10188, #10257, #10247, #10247, #9160, #10259, #9965, #10265, #10264, #10286, #10282, #10290, #10291, #10300, #9929, #8276, #10218, #10148, #10232, #10274, #10275, #10195, and #10233.