In July I’ve been playing around a bit more with -target. At this point I believe the best solution is to have a minimal ghc that doesn’t ship with any libraries; and all libraries are built on demand per target. We will likely want to pre-build and ship the Runtime System Library rts as we do not have a cabal package that would just build the rts. You’d have to specify the targets for which you want to build/include the rts. …

This post will be quite brief. I wasn’t able to carve out much time in June as my wife an I have just welcomed a new human being.

As the 8.6.1 alpha was just announced, I’m trying to finish adapting the llvm-ng backend as quickly as I can and build a fresh set of pre-built ghc 8.6.1 cross compilers.

With GHC 8.6.1 being released soon, the windows for patches was closing fast. While not necessarily cross compilation related, I was still able to get a patch in the infamous load command size limit issue on macOS.

Interestingly windows suffers from a similar issue. On windows we have a command argument size limit of 32k character from Windows 7 onwards. Cabals (and to that extend also Stacks, and all other tools that use Setup.hs) tendency to put libraries into their own folders results in one library search path per library. Thus once you have accumulated enough dependencies in your transitive…

Due to some travel in April, I wasn’t able to write up an update for what happened in March. So today we’ll have a combined update for March and April.

Alp Mestanogullari has finished hadrian#531, which was a clean up of my earlier hadrian#445. As such we now build relocatable GHCs with hadrian by default! 🎉

I have been making progress on the Windows front to the point where we don’t even need a windows installation anymore, and run the iserv slave via WINE. More on that soon!

As I’ve had to work a lot more with nix recently, I’ve…

At the haskell.sg March Meetup I gave a short presentation on how to cross compile dhall-json to raspberry pi, and the issues you might run into. I wanted to show that it is possible to cross compile non-trivial Haskell packages today, and that issues (ghc-head, build-type, and Template Haskell) have mostly trivial fixes of which most can in principle be upsteamed.

The talk coincided with the release of GHC 8.4, and the release of a new zlib package to hackage, which renders the need to fix zlib unnecessary.

Note that while this works, the fix for contravariant is…

While I didn’t manage to find the time to write anything here in February, I did make some progress on the cross compilation front.

cabal can now be invoked outside of the source folder, and tries to not pollute the source tree with generated files anymore (haskell/cabal#4874). The --with-PROG flag is now properly respected when using new-build; this allows new-build to work with cross compilers (haskell/cabal#5018). I’ve also spent quite some time to get cabals CI back into shape, which was hitting a rather obscure bug (haskell/cabal#5132).

I’ve also started working for IOHK where I will be assisting the DevOps…

After setting up hackage.mobilehaskell.org with S3 and fastly backing in December, I automated the overlay generation in January. This means that any patches pushed to the overlay repository will be automatically reflected in the overlay after a few minutes. Now all that’s missing is patches for common packages!

I’ve also managed to write a patch for cabal so that new-build properly propagates --with-PROG flags into dependencies. This should make it work much better for cross compilation, once the patch is merged. I’m hopeful this will happen soon.

Finally I’ve argued for the use (and improved) overlays in the SLURP and Uncurated Hackage Layer proposals, because I believe overlays are an underused feature that could provide us with solutions to the perceived problems (as I understand them) and offer a unified interface.

Nix is a purely functional package manager and NixOS is a purely functional Linux distribution. I have been running a NixOS server for a while now, and been quite happy with the configuration. However updating it has essentially been copying the configuration.nix file over and calling nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade. This builds packages that are not in the cache on the server. NixOps is the NixOS cloud deployment tool and I should be able to use it to provision the server. Specifically using NixOps on macOS seems to be rather uncommon. …