Stefan O'Rear wrote:
On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 06:41:53PM +0100, Brian Hulley wrote:
... I was
wondering if there are any plans to remove the GNU mp library from the
runtime
... http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ReplacingGMPNotes
Thanks for the link.
... although the program
includes code that is libre/gratis free the program is not itself free etc
etc...
Huh? ...
I meant if you are distributing a proprietary program then you have the
problem of trying to explain to an end-user all the intricacies involved
with the LGPL without conveying the impression that the whole program is
free. My impression is that someone who doesn't know anything about
programming might have a hard time understanding the LGPL correctly.
Ian Lynagh wrote:
I'll be looking at making it optional once 6.8.1 is out of the way, but
you will need to use a GHC compiled with an alternative; you won't be
able to make a non-GMP program with a GMP GHC.
Thanks, that's good news.
Perhaps one option for the non-GMP version of GHC would be to have a
large integer library written in Haskell itself, since it is useful to
have large integers even if they are not as fast as those provided by
GMP (eg when writing a lexer it is useful to have large integers to
correctly lex integer literals (ie without silently truncating them to
the capacity of an Int) but speed here is not that important).
To get high speed for stuff in external libs, perhaps some way of
extending the foreign interface to allow direct access to the Haskell
heap instead of always having to copy via the C heap, would be useful.
Duncan Coutts wrote:
Sounds to me like the simlest solution for you would be if GHC could use
a dynamically linked gmp.dll on Windows. That also sounds like much less
work that replacing gmp completely.
This would certainly make things easier though it doesn't solve every
problem. For example, the LGPL requires you to give permission to people
to reverse engineer your application, in order for them to be able to
understand it enough to get it to work with an updated version of the
LGPL component. Although this is perfectly reasonable imho, it leaves me
with a problem if my application also needs to make use of eg Microsoft
runtime components or third party proprietary statically linked
libraries since there are parts of my program binary for which I do not
have the authority to grant permission to reverse engineer thus it may
not even be possible for me to comply with the terms of the LGPL.
Of course I am not a lawyer so I may have got this wrong, but since I
can't possibly afford to hire a lawyer to look into all of this I have
to play it safe and therefore would prefer to avoid any use of LGPL
components in a proprietary app.
Thanks also to everyone else who replied,
Brian.
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