Re: [hoc-devel] Is this list dead?

[Daniel R. <da...@ph...>]

On Aug 17, 2008, at 7:54 PM, André Pang wrote:

> It's certainly not dead


In that case,

I've figured out the build problem with using the system libffi.  I'll  
commit a patch for that as soon as possible.

I've also figured out all the build problems dynamic libraries.  It  
turns out that mac os x is one of the few platforms that building PIC  
code and -dynamic works at all.  Unfortunately, none of the cabal  
libraries (or the ghc libraries) are built as shared libraries.  This  
means that your dynamic version of HOC needs to staticly link in all  
it's dependencies.  If your main app also links those dependencies,  
this creates two copies of that dependency in memory.  It's possible  
to build GHC and cabal stuff with all dynamic libraries (which will  
solve this problem) but the link command isn't generated by GHC and so  
must be determined by hand (or generated from the data in ghc-pkg),  
and more importantly, isn't supported by the cabal  or GHC build  
system very well.

I don't see any good reason to build HOC as a dynamic library, since  
without jumping through very small, very high loops, it's entirely  
possible it will increase your memory usage, thus negating the  
benefits of a shared library.

The best answer is that dynamic library support is very close to ready  
in GHC 6.10 (and is targeted for 6.10.1 currently).  GHC 6.10 is  
supposed to be out in a few weeks, so we should revisit dynamic  
libraries then.

There are a few other issues.
- HOC installs itself in an odd place with current versions of GHC.
- I'm unfamiliar with the cabal build system so I haven't touched that  
stuff at all.  Are there plans to maintain two build systems  
indefinitely?
- Mac OS 10.5 introduced xml descriptions useful for generating  
language bindings for all of their core frameworks.  It's entirely  
possible this could simplify the code generation.
- Mac OS 10.5 introduced garbage collection into Objective-C.  This  
might simplify the referencing managing code.
- Mac OS 10.5 also deprecated a whole bunch of objective c runtime calls
- make happily continues on errors, even with -k.  This should  
probably be fixed.

Now that I have a google code account, I'll try to add these issues in  
the issue tracker.

Right now I'm trying to understand the code that is there and adding  
comments as I figure it out.

-- 
Daniel