[Yhc] Bytecode API library

[Robert Dockins]

On Jun 20, 2006, at 8:37 AM, Neil Mitchell wrote:

> Yay!
>
>> http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~rdocki01/yhc-bytecode.html
>
> I haven't downloaded it yet (I'll get to it in a few days :) ), but it
> looks pretty much exactly like what I was aiming for, which is very
> nice to see!
>
> There is only one really small and minor thing - we have decided to
> use the namespace Yhc instead of YHC, since the compiler is
> "officially" called Yhc.


OK.  That's easy enough to change.  Is the namespace consumption  
otherwise acceptable?


> It would be nice if we could put this in the main Yhc, if thats ok by
> you. I'm not sure if we can give you commit access, but I'll look into
> it, and otherwise we can figure out a remote darcs repo and then pull
> from it as required. And also it would be nice for the back end of the
> compiler to use this as well.


Well, I suppose that depends on what's meant by "in the main Yhc".  I  
think its most valuable as a standalone library, so I'm not sure its  
a good idea to merge it into the Yhc compiler codebase, if that's  
what you mean.  If you mean "in the Yhc darcs repo" that may still be  
problematic if I can't get commit access, because there are still a  
number of things I hope to do with this library.

So, I guess I'm not really sure.  Perhaps explicitly pulling from a  
remote repository is the best thing for now?

The only other issue is that I don't think this library is 100% ready  
for production use.  I'd really like to write a good test suite  
before I feel comfortable with Yhc relying on it.  Unfortunately I'm  
not sure when I'll have time to do this :-(


> The only remaining this is the license, since none of the original nhc
> code made it to this side of the compiler, the only people with
> copyright on this stuff (or anything related to it) are you, me and
> Tom. Me and Tom both think that maybe LGPL would be more appropriate
> for this library, on the basis that then people can use the library
> from both a GPL program and a BSD program, and it seems that BSD is
> the prefered license for Haskell stuff, so it makes us more
> compatible.


OK.  I'll make the next release LGPL.


> Thanks for this great work!
>
> Neil


Rob Dockins

Speak softly and drive a Sherman tank.
Laugh hard; it's a long way to the bank.
           -- TMBG