[Haskell-cafe] [GSoC] Plugins for GHC

[Neil Mitchell]

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 <batterseapower at hotmail.com> 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
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