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GHC January 2022 update

· One min read

Hopefully 2022 should be the year GHC will get a JavaScript backend without relying on GHCJS. This month the team has been busy planning the work that needs to be done to get there!

Cross-compilation​

  • GHCJS has been updated to reduce the gap with GHC 8.10.7 codebase to the point that GHC’s build system is used to build GHCJS
  • Internal work planning for the integration of GHCJS into GHC
  • A different approach to load plugins into cross-compilers has been implemented [#20964, !7377]
  • GHCJS has been exercised to showcase compilation of some Plutus applications

Modularity​

  • A few “subsystems” of GHC have been made more modular and reusable by making them independent of the command-line flags (DynFlags) [#17957, !7158, !7199, !7325]. This work resulted in a 10% reduction in call sites to DynFlags and has now removed all references to DynFlags up to the CoreToStg pass, which is almost the entire backend of GHC.

Performance​

  • Jeffrey wrote a new HF proposal about writing a Haskell Optimization handbook and has started working on it