[haskell-llvm] llvm-general FFI dependencies

[Henning Thielemann]

Am 20.08.2013 10:55, schrieb Scott West:

>> Is Template Haskell used for parsing
>> the C stuff? It sounds crazy to me. So far I have used HSC for
>> interfacing from Haskell to C. However I have no experience with
>> automatic generation of FFI declarations using HSC.
>>
>
> No it doesn't parse the C stuff.
>
> The LLVM headers include a Instruction.def file that allows a caller to
> #define some macros to help generate structures. TH is used from there
> to generate some Haskell foreign declarations.

LLVM has this mysterious TableGen system for generating all kinds of 
files from Def files. It seems to be undocumented and LLVM people claim 
it is easy to understand. I tried to use it for automatically generating 
Haskell declarations for vector instruction intrinsics. Unfortunately I 
did not understand this TableGen system.

Maybe one should try harder to use that system since it is what the 
def-files are made for.


> I admit that this is not a huge concern for me. In particular, the time
> is already invested in the TH solution, so switching away from it will
> cost now or later, probably about the same. Given that so far there
> isn't a great call to get it working on the other compilers, its hard to
> justify putting in the effort.

The question for me is, whether I should invest into porting my code to 
llvm-general-ffi. In the current state I would prefer to stay with 
llvm-base as is.