[haskell-llvm] Maintainership still ongoing?

[Carter Schonwald]

thanks! Benjamin S is articulating a lot of points much much better than I
could :)
emphatically agree


On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Benjamin Saunders <besaunde at sfu.ca> wrote:

> I've moved my projects over to llvm-general and do not expect to be doing
> further work on llvm and llvm-base.
>
> llvm-general in fact exposes far more FFI-based functionality than
> llvm-base (see the LLVM.General.* modules at
> http://bscarlet.github.io/llvm-general/3.3.7.0/doc/html/llvm-general/index.html), and provides a very nice interface for them. There's no direct exposure
> of the FFI, in part because it includes many custom wrappers for
> functionality available only through C++, rather than just providing access
> to the LLVM C API. Speaking as someone who has worked on both,
> llvm-general's FFI story is also much cleaner and far more maintainable
> than that of llvm-base, thanks in part to extensive use of template
> haskell, and in general benefits massively from the relative absence of
> cruft, to the point that the most plausible way to port llvm-general's FFI
> stuff to llvm-base would be to rename to llvm-base.
>
> If all that you want to use is the FFI, I suggest reconsidering your
> usecase in light of the llvm-general API. It provides access to all of the
> functionality exposed by FFI in llvm-base plus much more in cleaner and
> more idiomatic Haskell interfaces, and generating Haskell-side ASTs is a
> far nicer experience than calling out to the IR builder directly, or even
> working with elaborate low-level wrappers as I was experimenting with. I'm
> not sure what you're doing, but I have a hard time imagining a situation
> where redoing all of the extensive binding and wrapping work that
> transforms a raw C FFI into something nice to use is the most efficient
> solution.
>
> Another idea that's been bounced around a little is to write a legacy
> layer that ports the typesafe API of the Haskell llvm package onto
> llvm-general.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Scott West" <scott.west at inf.ethz.ch>
> To: "Carter Schonwald" <carter.schonwald at gmail.com>
> Cc: haskell-llvm at projects.haskell.org
> Sent: Monday, August 12, 2013 8:51:42 AM
> Subject: Re: [haskell-llvm] Maintainership still ongoing?
>
> Hi Carter,
> > Llvm-general has a better ffi story than llvm/llvm-base.  And provides a
> > nice way to map  back and forth between the Haskell AST and the llvm c++
> > in memory AST.  It's really a markedly better substrate. And there's no
> > cruft in its build scripting!
>
> Well, I'd be happy to have a better FFI story in llvm-base! Is there
> something fundamental in the FFI bindings that makes it so the
> improvements cannot be shifted to llvm-base under the same/similar
> interface?
>
> It seems that the FFI isn't even exposed in llvm-general, what if that's
> all I want to use?
>
> I think you're going to face a hard sell telling people to switch to
> llvm-general; it's not exactly a replacement for llvm-base.
>
> I think the optimal solution would be to find a way for llvm-general to
> use llvm-base for its FFI (not the AST part of course). I'd be willing
> to help integrate the improvements on the FFI side into llvm-base, if
> they are portable. If we can find a way to cooperate here I think it
> will benefit everyone in the long run :).
>
> Thanks for chiming in on the llvm-general side!
>
> Regards,
> Scott
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-llvm mailing list
> Haskell-llvm at projects.haskell.org
> http://projects.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-llvm
>
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-llvm mailing list
> Haskell-llvm at projects.haskell.org
> http://projects.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-llvm
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://projects.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-llvm/attachments/20130812/8c2e3c01/attachment.htm>