hi all, I've been working on GHCJS [1] for a while and am trying to get it to work on 64 bit GHC.
A quick background: GHCJS uses the GHC API to generate STG, which it then translates to JavaScript. It uses slightly patched versions of the integer-gmp, base and ghc-prim libraries and supports many GHC features, including arrays and threading. All JavaScript numbers are essentially double precision floating point. With some tricks (using bitwise operators) it's possible to get reasonable 32 bit integer emulation out of it, but emulating 64 bit integers would be very slow. Therefore, if we compile Haskell to JavaScript, it should really be treated as a 32 bit target. Now this is a problem, with GHC 7.6 and lower, generated STG depended on the word size of the host, so it was simply impossible to do this with a 64 bit host. In HEAD, wORD_SIZE_IN_BITS is now in DynFlags, so I decided to have another go. I'm aiming for the following procedure to install GHCJS and build a package: # cabal install ghcjs -- installs `ghcjs`, `ghcjs-boot`, `ghcjs-pkg`, `ghcjs-cabal` # ghcjs-boot -- build ghc-prim, integer-gmp, base for GHCJS and register them in its package db # ghcjs-cabal install myPackage -- cabal wrapper that uses ghcjs instead of ghc GHCJS instructs the GHC API to build 32 bit code [2] and sets preprocessor definitions so that libraries also expect 32 bit code. Library patches include PrimOpWrappers in ghc-prim, which is generated from the 32 bit primops. But here's the problem: When typechecking PrimOpWrappers, the GHC API appears to use its own built-in types for everything in GHC.Prim, and there are differences between 32 bit and 64 bit (for example popCnt64# :: Word64# -> Word# on 32 bit, :: Word# -> Word# on 64), so you get lots of errors. Now I'm wondering, is there a way around this, or would it be reasonable to modify GHC to somehow have the primop types in DynFlags, instead of them being hardcoded in the compiler? luite [1] https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs (I'm mostly working in the Gen2 branch, an experimental faster code generator) [2] https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs/blob/gen2/src-bin/Compiler/Main.hs#L345 _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
