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Abstract

GHC uses so called interface files (.hi files) to capture information about modules to be used when compiling modules that depend on previously compiled modules. By allowing to include additional metadata in .hi files, we can capture, and extract additional information in a more structured format, instead of writing this info into custom files. By reusing .hi files, existing tooling does not need to be adapted.

Haskell Interface Files

Currently, interface files are stuctured as:

• Magic number, which signals that it should be a real .hi file
• Legacy empty field
• Interface format version
• Way descriptor
• FastString dictionary pointer
• Name symbol table pointer
• Actual interface file
• Symbol table
• Dictionary

Additional Metadata Uses

https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/Core-interface-section motivates the case for including core in interface files, to make it available via loadCore :: ModIface -> m (Maybe ModGuts), to be used by examples such as Liquid Haskell, resumable compilation, and plugins including Plutus.

In addition to their primary purpose for IDE-like uses, HIE files can we used for dead code elimination. Weeder (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/weeder-2.0.0) does this. By including the HIE data in the interface file instead of a separate file, other tools gain the opacity of a single file.

In the same way that plugins would like to access core data, it would also be useful to make it possible for them to write their own information, and access it later.

Extensible Interface Files

We propose to extend interface files into a sectioned format that can store arbitrary metadata for keys, to allow for a maximum flexibility. Sectioning is already used by certain .o file formats, for example ELF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_and_Linkable_Format), and Mach-O (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach-O#Mach-O_file_layout).

From the user's perspective, such an API would look like:

type FieldName = String

readIfaceField   :: Binary a => FieldName      -> ModIface -> IO (Maybe a)
writeIfaceField  :: Binary a => FieldName -> a -> ModIface -> IO ModIface
deleteIfaceField ::             FieldName      -> ModIface ->    ModIface

By using GHC's internal Binary class, we can reuse instances for existing types in GHC. However, since Name and FastString are each serialised into a lookup table, fields that consist of these would require a more internal API.

readIfaceFieldWith  :: FieldName -> (BinHandle -> IO a ) -> ModIface -> IO (Maybe a)
writeIfaceFieldWith :: FieldName -> (BinHandle -> IO ()) -> ModIface -> IO ModIface

This internal API presents a way for files that resemble the current .hi/.HIE file structure to simply write their format directly to a local BinHandle, and have this data be copied into the .hi file's handle during ModIface serialisation. Of course, the constrained API can be trivially written in terms of this internal API using put_ and get.

Then, we can capture these fields in the ModIface as:

data BinData = BinData Int (ForeignPtr Word8)
data ExtensibleFields = ExtensibleFields (Data.Map FieldName BinData)

Then the captured data can be simply copied to the end of the interface file. For external tools to access a field without fully deserialising the interface, it would be important to add an additional pointer ('fields pointer') in the header, for example after the symbol table pointer.

For a tool to jump quickly to its required field, there should then we a header for the additional data, for example formatted as:

• Number of additional fields - the fields pointer would point here
• Field 1 name
• Field 1 pointer
• Field 2 name
• Field 2 pointer
• ...
• Field 1 payload
• Field 2 payload

Compatibility

The current format maintains header compatibility up to the version field, which is checked when deserialising, so these changes are within what different versions of GHC expect to see.

Complications

Since interface files are written later in the build process, this doesn't properly enable us to store outputs of early stages in the compiler, without completing enough of the build. For example, this technique would be inappropriate for an IDE to capture a parsed AST, to use for syntax highlighting, so failed type checking would prevent the interface file, and therefore its additonal data, being written. Of course, the GHC API could be used instead in this example, and potentially for other early build output use cases.

Name and FastString have a special handling in interface files, in which they are written to the end of an interface file in a lookup table, and referenced within the serialised interface payload by their table indicies. There are currently minorly different implementations for how this is done with interfaces, HIE, and Haddock. Since additional fields that are serialised from the GHC pipeline will contain these two types, it's probably a good time to generalise this behaviour.

To solve this, we can define wrapper functions to put/get a Binary payload, including the pointers before it, and the tables after it.

putWithTable :: Binary a => BinHandle -> a -> IO ()
getWithTable :: Binary a => BinHandle      -> IO a

Complete Interface File Format

File format:

• File header
  • [32 bits] Magic number, which signals that it should be a real .hi file
  • [32 bits] File format version (taken from previously empty legacy field)
  • [0/32 bits] Remainder of legacy field
  • [String] Payload format version
  • [String] Way descriptor
  • [32 bits] Extensible fields header pointer
  • [32 bits] FastString dictionary pointer
  • [32 bits] Name symbol table pointer
• GHC interface payload (payload version dependent)
  • Actual interface data
  • Symbol table
  • Dictionary
• Extensible fields header
  • [64 bits] number of extensible fields
  • n extensible field header entries
    • [String] field name
    • [32 bits] field pointer
  • n extensible field data entries
    • [64 bits] size of the field in bytes
    • [x bytes] field data

String format:

• [64 bit Int] number of list elements
• [n * 32 bit] list elements

V2 Zip Interface Archives

Instead of extending the current format, we can use an archive format and store the current interface data (ModIface) as a field within that. If we use a zip format, then fields use file paths for namespacing, and the interface looks like:

Example.hi
|- manifest
|- ghc
   |- ModIface
      |- data
      |- dictionary
      |- symbol-table
   |- ModGuts
   |- CgGuts
   |- Typecheck
|- hie
|- third-party-example

Advantages:

• If we use zip as the archive format, then interface files can be explored by common utilities
• The current logic that requires the serialisation to jump back to write the location of the dictionary and symbol table to the header becomes simplified because those tables can now be written as separate named fields
• By removing the dependency on the current ModIface format, we can now write interface files earlier in the pipeline - where previously the interface file couldn't exist until the core pipeline had run - so now we can, for example, write an interface file early on that only contains type checking outputs

Disadvantages:

• Finding a .hi file on disk doesn't guarantee that it actually contains proper interface data - though the current version also doesn't in the sense that interface files produced by different versions of GHC are incompatible

Implementation

Extensible ModIface

The starting step for implementation would include:

• Adding ExtensibleFields to the ModIface record
• Define the sectioned fields header format in the Binary instance of ExtensibleFields
• read/write/detele functions for the fields
• Generalised lookup table serialisation functions (putWithTable/getWithTable)

Core Field

With the new lookup table serialisation functions, we can define the core field:

• IfaceSyn versions of the parts of ModGuts that aren't currently used in the ModIface
• Missing instances

HIE Field

To write the HIE Field, we can reuse the existing HIE file functions by changing them to take a BinHandle as an argument.

Refactoring Existing File Formats

.hi and .hie formats handle the NameCache in a fairly straightforward way, using an IO NameCacheUpdater in the case of interface files:

newtype NameCacheUpdater
      = NCU { updateNameCache :: forall c. (NameCache -> (NameCache, c)) -> IO c }

While the HIE file handling inlines this in its read signature:

readHieFileWithVersion :: (HieHeader -> Bool) -> NameCache -> FilePath -> IO (Either HieHeader (HieFileResult, NameCache))

However, Haddock is more general in its monad:

type NameCacheAccessor m = (m NameCache, NameCache -> m ())

and defines its own equivalent of updateNameCache:

with_name_cache :: forall a.
                   ((forall b.
                             (NameCache -> IO (NameCache, b))
                             -> IO b)
                    -> m a)
                -> m a

Generalising these should be possible, but it may not be worth it to include Haddock's use case.

Conclusion

Extensible interface files carry the advantage over custom additional files in that tooling doesn't need to know about the existence of the additional data, and sectioned object formats see common use elsewhere, with use cases such as:

• Core:
  • Resumable compilation
  • Plutus (plugin)
  • Liquid Haskell
• HIE:
  • IDEs
  • Weeder
• Custom data:
  • Plugins
  • IDEs
  • Build tools