Building GHC: The tools

After getting to know package databases we are going to look into the set of tools that are used when building the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

alex & happy

alex is a tool to generate lexical analysers in Haskell, and as such can turn =.x= files into =.hs= files. happy is a parser generator, which can turn =.y= files into =.hs= files.

ghc-pkg

We saw during getting to know package databases. It is the command line interface to the package databases.

ghc-cabal

While cabal comes with the Cabal library and the cabal command line tool in the cabal-install package. The build system needs an easy way to just extract values from =.cabal= files and add some customizations to configuring, copying, and registering packages via cabal. This is what ghc-cabal is for. It produces the package-data.mk file, which is a Makefile that contains information from the =.cabal= file, such as it’s Haskell Sources, C Sources, … and as such provides the Make based build system with sufficient information to build all the libraries. Yes, we do not use cabal to build GHC.

deriveConstants

This utility is used during the build process to generate header files containing constant values (word sizes, …) of the target platform and when the compiler is built those are included to provide those target specific information.

hsc2hs

When binding to C libraries, the process can be quite tedious and hsc2hs tries to make this a bit easier. It is also used quite a lot outside of GHC itself. It even has its own GHC User’s Guide entry.

genapply & genprimopcode

GHCs runtime system needs to apply functions of various arities when evaluating a program. genapply produces the AutoApply.cmm file which is part of the rts package. The AutoApply.cmm file defines the standard closures used to represent application of functions of various artities.

Functions that can not be implement in Haskell directly are called Primitive Operations (PrimOps) while these functions are provided natively by GHC, the genprimopcode utility uses a highlevel description of the PrimOps in the compiler/prelude/primops.txt.pp and produces the necessary plumbing around them: header files, curried wrappers, haddock information.

touchy

While unix systems have the touch command. Windows does not. As GHC uses touch during building and compilation of Haskell files, touchy is required on Windows as a substitute.

unlit

As GHC has support for Literate Haskell, it needs to be able to extract the Haskell source from a =.lhs= source file. unlit is the filter that can stirp the literate part out of a =.lhs= file and just leave the =.hs= part.


compareSizes

When comparing two ghc builds, it can be of interest to see whether or not the file size of haskell interface files (.hi) or objects (.o) has increased or decreased. As such the compareSizes utility is not essential to build GHC, but useful when trying to gauge what effect a change has on interface and object file sizes.

hp2ps

The hp2ps tool is also widely used. It turns a heap profile generated by GHC into a (hopefully) easier to undertand graphical representation.

ghctags

vim and emacs can read so called TAGS files, which provide an index to source-code definitions of function, variables, and other points of interest.

ghctags is capable of generating such a file for Haskell sources. As such it is also a not an essential utility to build GHC.

hpc

The hpc tool can be used to generate code coverage reports for Haskell code. It even has it’s own page on the haskell wiki.


In conclusion I hope this was somewhat informative. And while not all tools are strictly used to build GHC. I believe this covers all the utilities that are part of the GHC source tree.