GitLab

Reviewers: hvr, goldfire, austin, RyanGlScott, bgamari

Reviewed By: RyanGlScott, bgamari

Subscribers: RyanGlScott, thomie

Differential Revision: https://phabricator.haskell.org/D2118

Currently, Template Haskell's treatment of strictness is not enough to
cover all possible combinations of unpackedness and strictness. In
addition, it isn't equipped to deal with new features (such as
`-XStrictData`) which can change a datatype's fields' strictness during
compilation.

To address this, I replaced TH's `Strict` datatype with
`SourceUnpackedness` and `SourceStrictness` (which give the programmer a
more complete toolkit to configure a datatype field's strictness than
just `IsStrict`, `IsLazy`, and `Unpack`). I also added the ability to
reify a constructor fields' strictness post-compilation through the
`reifyConStrictness` function.

Fixes #10697.

Test Plan: ./validate

Reviewers: simonpj, goldfire, bgamari, austin

Reviewed By: goldfire, bgamari

Subscribers: thomie

Differential Revision: https://phabricator.haskell.org/D1603

GHC Trac Issues: #10697

Summary:
(Apologies for the size of this patch, I couldn't make a smaller one
that was validate-clean and also made sense independently)

(Some of this code is derived from GHCJS.)

This commit adds support for running interpreted code (for GHCi and
TemplateHaskell) in a separate process.  The functionality is
experimental, so for now it is off by default and enabled by the flag
-fexternal-interpreter.

Reaosns we want this:

* compiling Template Haskell code with -prof does not require
  building the code without -prof first

* when GHC itself is profiled, it can interpret unprofiled code, and
  the same applies to dynamic linking.  We would no longer need to
  force -dynamic-too with TemplateHaskell, and we can load ordinary
  objects into a dynamically-linked GHCi (and vice versa).

* An unprofiled GHCi can load and run profiled code, which means it
  can use the stack-trace functionality provided by profiling without
  taking the performance hit on the compiler that profiling would
  entail.

Amongst other things; see
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/RemoteGHCi for more details.

Notes on the implementation are in Note [Remote GHCi] in the new
module compiler/ghci/GHCi.hs.  It probably needs more documenting,
feel free to suggest things I could elaborate on.

Things that are not currently implemented for -fexternal-interpreter:

* The GHCi debugger
* :set prog, :set args in GHCi
* `recover` in Template Haskell
* Redirecting stdin/stdout for the external process

These are all doable, I just wanted to get to a working validate-clean
patch first.

I also haven't done any benchmarking yet.  I expect there to be slight hit
to link times for byte code and some penalty due to having to
serialize/deserialize TH syntax, but I don't expect it to be a serious
problem.  There's also lots of low-hanging fruit in the byte code
generator/linker that we could exploit to speed things up.

Test Plan:
* validate
* I've run parts of the test suite with
EXTRA_HC_OPTS=-fexternal-interpreter, notably tests/ghci and tests/th.
There are a few failures due to the things not currently implemented
(see above).

Reviewers: simonpj, goldfire, ezyang, austin, alanz, hvr, niteria, bgamari, gibiansky, luite

Subscribers: thomie

Differential Revision: https://phabricator.haskell.org/D1562