[Haskell-cafe] hmatrix under ghci on x86_64

[Tom Doris]

I'm using ghci + hmatrix and a few other packages as a Haskell based
replacement for Matlab, everything works well so far in terms of available
functionality. However, I have encountered an issue when running in ghci on
x86_64 systems - calls into functions that in turn call gsl functions will
result in a bus error, e.g:

Prelude> :m +Numeric.Container
Prelude Numeric.Container> randomVector 10 Gaussian 10
fromList Bus error (core dumped)

I attached gdb and found the bus error was happening in gsl_rng_alloc() but
some investigation indicate that the problem is probably due to this bug in
ghci: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2912 which has been marked
as a duplicate of http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/781 and a
recent update to 781 indicates that it won't be addressed until at least v
7.6.1 (781 also references http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3658 and
it seems that this is a pretty large piece of work - moving to fully
dynamically linked ghci which has been around for a while and pushed back a
few times).

Does anyone know of a workaround that would allow ghci to use wrapped gsl
functionality on x86_64 systems in the meantime? Most linux boxes used by
quants are x86_64 now, so this issue will impact many people who would like
to use Haskell instead of Matlab.

Thanks
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