What is New in Cross Compiling Haskell

November Edition

Wow, it’s December already! So what happened last month? As I detailed in the October Edition I have been working on a hadrian fork, that should allow us to build relocatable binary distributions for GHC, and specifically for cross compilers. This work has seen quite some improvement (in hadrian and cabal), and I am now able to build relocatable binary distributions of GHC cross compilers and if there are no more obstacles, the should be ready soon. So keep an eye out for changes on hackage.mobilehaskell.org, or just follow @mobilehaskell where I’ll announce updates when they are ready.

Also part 2 and part 3 to complement the first part of Building GHC were published. I hope they provide some insight into how the GHC build system works. This naturally came up while hacking on hadrian.

Alp Mestanogullari has started helping out with the hadrian. To get hadrian into a state where it can produce proper installable distributions. As this is easier with relocatable binary distributions, he has taken my branch as a basis for this. I hope we’ll be able to merge chunks of the branch back into the upstream hadrian soon.

I’ve also started accepting donations via Patreon or crypto currencies (e.g. see the Building GHC: The Stages post. As such if you want to support this endeavor, you now can!

As we’ve now got recording gear for our haskell.sg Meetups, I hope to be able to present more on cross compilation and have recording of it up afterwards. The first two recordings of the November talk, head over to the haskell.sg youtube channel. I hope to get around uploading the December recordings over the weekend. However due to the microphone dying during the first talk, we might only have the second talk properly recorded.

On a final note: if you have something specific on you’d like me to write about, let me know!