Hi Max, This sounds fantastic!
My only question would be how this relates to the external Core work that Tim has been doing. If we have this, can external core become a plugin? If we have this, do we no longer need external Core? It seems to say that we don't want external Core as the interface, as it won't be stable in any way - does that mean we don't want external Core at all? Thanks Neil We certainly need a mechanism for doing On 3/21/08, Max Bolingbroke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm interested in working on a plugins system for the Glasgow Haskell > Compiler. The idea here is to allow third parties to add more > capabilities to the compiler in a way that doesn't involve messing > around with modifying GHC itself. Potential use cases are: > * Allow Haskell code to be selectively run on GPUs > * Idiosyncratic application-specific optimization passes > * And whatever clever ideas the community comes up with! > > This project has previously been proposed as an Microsoft Research > internship project > (http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Internships).I have a > preliminary wiki page with details at > http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Plugins > > I'd particularly like to get feedback from the list on: > * Other design goals people would like to see > * Improvements to the proposed (very half-baked!) user interface > * Other hooks people think they might like to have into the compiler > * Interested mentors. Simon PJ has indicated he would be interested in > mentoring this, but there might be other projects that need him more? > > This project would satisfy a dependency that Manuel mentioned in > http://groups.google.com/group/fa.haskell/msg/3ca260fb075a901e to > implement an "array DSL" for GPUs in Haskell. It would mean GHC taking > a dependency on hs-plugins > (http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/hs-plugins/), as that's our current > strategy to allow GHC to dynamically link with the plugins. > > A little about my experience with GHC: this year I worked on > implementing comprehensive comprehensions > (http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/list-comp/index.htm) as > my final year undergraduate project, supervised by Simon PJ. I have > subsequently implemented a few other patches, adding some core-level > optimizations / bug fixes (some of which are pending review). > > Thanks in advance for your comments! > Max > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
