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GHC DevX June 2022 Update

· 2 min read

This is the June 2022 monthly update from the GHC DevX team at IOG.

JavaScript Backend for GHC​

For a few months we have been merging GHCJS (Haskell to JavaScript compiler) into GHC. We set our first milestone to be the ability to compile and to run the usual "Hello World" program. It turned out to be much more involved than we initially thought (requiring FFI support, etc.), but we should be getting there soon.

This month we have made the following progress:

  • Linking: GHCJS requires some functions to be directly implemented in JavaScript (e.g. the RTS, some low-level functions in base). We have added support for linking .js files. We've also added support for a preprocessing pass with CPP for .js.pp files.

  • js-sources: there is some ongoing work to load these external JavaScript files from installed libraries. Cabal provides a js-sources stanza for this, we need to adapt Hadrian to make use of it.

  • Binary vs Objectable: GHCJS used its own ByteString-based Objectable type-class: we replaced it with GHC's similar Binary type-class. Josh has published a blog post about their differences.

  • 64-bit primops: we've added support for 64-bit primops (Word64# and Int64# types). In GHCJS (GHC 8.10), these were still implemented as foreign function calls. It's no longer true on GHC head.

  • base library: added CPP as required to support the JS backend. Ported and converted FFI imports from GHCJS to use JavaScript fat arrows (we haven't implemented GHCJS's fancy import syntax yet).

Now we can compile and link the "HelloWorld" program. To reach the first milestone we only have to fix the remaining runtime errors.

You can follow our progress on our development branch here. We now rebase this branch every Friday to avoid lagging too much behind GHC head.

Haskell Optimization Handbook​

The "Haskell Optimization Handbook" is an accepted proposal of the Haskell Foundation. Jeff has been steadily writing some initial material as per the project plan.