Status of Mac 64 bit GHC

[Don Stewart]

Thanks Gregory!

That's very helpful. I'll update the HP release page, moving the 64
bit version down the page, and clearly labelling it.

-- Don

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Gregory Wright <gwright at antiope.com> wrote:
> On 3/7/11 1:41 PM, Don Stewart wrote:
>>
>> Hey guys,
>>
>> Talking to Simon Marlow, he's suspicious that the 64 bit GHC for Mac
>> isn't fully working yet. In particular, GHCi isn't working?
>>
>> Can someone confirm / deny GHC 7.0.2 64 bit Mac support is there? What
>> is its state?
>>
>> If e.g. GHCi isn't workng, we better mark it as "experimental, try at
>> your own risk" on the HP page
>>
>> http://code.galois.com/darcs/haskell-platform/download-website/mac.html
>
> It mostly works.  I've not had a ghc-7-branch build fail for at least a
> couple
> of months now (unless I broke it myself while working).  For most purposes
> ghci seems to work.  In rare cases it crashes, and it will be less reliable
> than on other platforms.
>
> The issue is this:  until quite recently, ghci's runtime linker didn't work
> at
> all.  The biggest problems are fixed, buts since I was doing a lot of work
> late in the release cycle, I can't guarantee that everything is OK.
>
> I am trying to resolve all of the test failures on OS X 64 bit that affect
> ghci exclusively.  There are perhaps 6 to 10 of these.  Some of them don't
> happen all of the time, so they'll be hard to track down.  The first
> failures
> I looked at, time002 and time004, turned out to be unrelated to ghci,
> although
> for some reason they only failed when run interactively.  This story
> is available in ticket #4970.  My current effort is to resolve #5003.
>
> It might be wise to label the release as "experimental" since it's the
> first for OS X 64 bit.  But the best way to smoke out the remaining bugs
> is to have more people try it.  Maybe call it a "preview release" and ask
> people to file bug reports on the trac.  (In fact, if the ghci banner
> included
> this information users could be considered appropriately warned.)
>
> Greg
>
> --
> Gregory Wright
> Antiope Associates LLC
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>
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>
>