| 7 Sep 2025 |
 Artem | often times, GHC HEAD can't be compiled with a GHC just out of the support window (last three releases or so). I'd expect it to be a non-trivial projecct to make MHS compile GHC.. | 20:32:24 |
| Artem | * often times, GHC HEAD can't be compiled with a GHC just out of the support window (last three releases or so). I'd expect it to be a non-trivial project to make MHS compile GHC... | 20:32:37 |
 emily | does GHC not use type families or generics? | 21:02:18 |
| emily | or implicit parameters or magic hash? | 21:02:31 |
| emily | https://discourse.haskell.org/t/microhs-and-hackage/12916/6 | 21:02:36 |
| emily | sounds unlikely to me | 21:02:43 |
 Alex | Can't know how much effort it is until someone actually tries. | 21:16:57 |
| emily | well | 21:22:32 |
 maralorn | Looking at all the hype that MicroHS is getting I can’t imagine that no one is thinking about it. 😄 | 21:22:44 |
| emily | people tried to get even ancient GHC building with Hugs without success | 21:22:45 |
| emily | so my prior is at least not totally uninformed | 21:23:03 |
| emily | the sad thing about MicroHs is that AFAICT it won't offer a true from-source bootstrap | 21:23:21 |
| emily | just a more portable blob one | 21:23:27 |
| emily | since you still must go through an unauditable machine-generated C file to start with | 21:23:52 |
| emily | maybe someone could implement an interpreter to run MicroHs to start it off though 🫠 | 21:24:16 |
| emily | https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/802-More_thoughts_on_a_bootstrappable_GHC
https://elephly.net/posts/2017-01-09-bootstrapping-haskell-part-1.html
| 21:25:12 |
| emily | some background reading for anyone considering embarking on this task | 21:25:25 |
| Alex | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
the sad thing about MicroHs is that AFAICT it won't offer a true from-source bootstrap Why not?
It runs fine under Hugs. I've already gotten that working. | 21:28:07 |
| emily | that's promising then | 21:28:22 |
| emily | although it also means maintaining Hugs to keep it working with newer C compilers :) | 21:28:45 |
| emily | but might not be too bad | 21:28:58 |
| emily | the Discourse post I linked implies to me that extensions like implicit parameters are WONTFIX, so there may be politics involved in getting GHC to stop using extensions that MicroHs doesn't want | 21:29:48 |
| Alex | I'd rather avoid it, but forking or preprocessing to handle such extensions isn't out of the question. | 21:30:43 |
| emily | does Hugs even work on x86-64? 🤔 | 21:30:55 |
| emily | that's a pretty large indefinite future workload IMO | 21:31:14 |
| emily | unless you just accept the bootstrap chain getting longer and longer forever | 21:31:30 |
| emily | which has big issues itself | 21:31:36 |
| Alex | Potentially, yes, which is mostly why I'd rather not. | 21:31:38 |
| emily | e.g. it messes up easy bootstrap of new architectures | 21:31:46 |
| emily | since now you have to backport codegen to every version | 21:31:59 |
