haskell 7 world -> moving to 8!

[Ken Cunningham]

On 2019-09-12, at 7:51 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> 
> 
> Cool!
> 
> Doesn't it work if you simply use this working ghc-bootstrap to build version 8?
> Or is Haskell too picky about what version of compiler you require to
> build something newer, and you can only go forward one tiny step at a
> time?
> 

The Haskell bootstrap rule appears to be two major steps at a time, and for whatever reason they skip odd numbered minor versions.

Bootstrapping up to a current ghc from our previous ghc 7.8.3 looks like it may not be overly difficult, in the end, at least it went pretty smoothly:

$ port -v installed ghc
The following ports are currently installed:
  ghc @7.8.3_6 platform='darwin 10' archs='x86_64' date='2017-11-19T13:47:09-0800'
  ghc @8.0.2_0 (active) platform='darwin 10' archs='x86_64' date='2019-09-12T18:04:13-0700'


It all goes pretty easily, but it does take some time. 

This ghc compiler I'm building looks like it should work on all 64bit systems 10.6+, I think. Have to see.

I think this might deliver a newer ghc 8.6.3 for older systems (actually 8.8.1 is out now, so I might just go all the way to there)  and then once we have a bootstrap we can just use the current haskell infrastructure & stack.



On the way-out-there fringe, who knows about i386: There is an 8.8.1  i386 bootstrap binary for debian, so it appears possible to ponder that, at least. 

I would not be surprised if it also worked on Intel 10.5, but PPC is pretty much out, I think, because the llvm backend that haskell uses can't produce quality PPC code... although I do in fact have a working llvm-3.9 and llvm-5.0 for PPC that might actually work, as ghc is only C code. Not sure about the ABI issues...

Maybe a cross compiler might be fun to try out, someday...

Ken


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