GHC 7 is released. with LLVM, improved inliner, improved thread scheduler ... | Hacker News Reader

GHC 7 is released. with LLVM, improved inliner, improved thread scheduler ...

haskell.org

98 pointsdons14 comments

I'm confused. Their site says GHC 7.01 was released in November 2010. This release is 7.02.

7.0.1 was the release candidate for 7.0.2 (stable).

Sounds like they learned their release numbering skills from the KDE folks.

I'm not sure if they do it but many projects use odd=unstable,even=stable version schemes including GNOME.

Yes, but that's usually in the second digit (e.g. 2.4 is stable, 2.5 is development) - switching from unstable to stable in a nominal patch release (third digit) is at least uncommon.

Yes, the title is confusing. GHC 7.02 is significant because it will be included in the next Haskell Platform release -- GHC 7.01 was only available separately, and was not much installed.

GHC 7.01 was also a time of upheaval in the code base, with an almost total rewrite of the type checker. This was a bit buggy at first, but early experience with 7.01 means that it is much more polished in 7.02.

The full changelist from 7.0.1 is modest and available at http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.2/html/users_guide/relea...

I didn't see, in the release notes (http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.2/html/users_guide/relea...), any mentions of improved inlining or thread scheduling. Do you have a link to that?

Those came with ghc 7.0.1.

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/relea...

Previously on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908503

Why is GHC doing thread scheduling?

Haskell (GHC at least) has lightweight user-level threads, similar to Erlang.

(Disclaimer: I've never programmed Haskell or used GHC outside of Xmonad)

I'm pretty sure they use a M:N language-thread to OS-thread system. So they need to decide what thread to put "on" an OS-thread at any given time.

GHC provides a parallel programming model,

* K sparks scheduled over * M lightweight threads scheduled onto * N OS threads over * C hardware cores.

The runtime manages this, and does load balancing.

How does this LLVM integration work? Is just a Haskell->LLVM compiler?

awaiting the haskell platform release to get the next GHC ..

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