New challenges ahead

[Thomas DuBuisson]

Norman,

This is all informative for you or anyone else reading the list.

* About Me and HaLVM
I'm a PhD student under Andrew Tolmach (original developer of the
HaLVM) and have used HaLVM in the past (but not been involved with its
development).  Our group [1] is working on defining and building a
compiler for the Habit programming language (once called "Systems
Haskell").  Part of that work involves building demo projects, which
will likely be a Habit-HaLVM and part of an L4 kernel.

* About HaLVM and GHC
HaLVM is a series of patches to GHC (mostly the RTS) and supporting
libraries.  It is not upstreamed into GHC head nor does it look like
that will happen.  For this reason, the version of HaLVM always lags
behind GHC (HaLVM is currently based on GHC 6.12.3 where as version
7.0.2 is current).

GHC can not currently usable as a cross compiler, but there is
community interest in this topic [2] (with no momentum).

* About HaLVM and House (and "Linux Kernel Modules in Haskell")
The GHC patches developed for HaLVM remove all dynamic allocation,
assumptions about the existence of a file system, etc.  For this
reason, the same patches were used in the House and Linux module work.
 Not sure how much this matches with the Genode framework (as much as
I've played with installing Genode and associated kernel I never
really looked at the API).

Cheers,
Thomas

[1] http://hasp.cs.pdx.edu/
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/CrossCompilation

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:31 AM, Norman Feske
<norman.feske at ...1...> wrote:
> Hello Thomas,
>
> the HalVM project was brought to our attention by an anonymous posting
> at our Sourceforge forum:
>
>  http://sourceforge.net/projects/genode/forums/forum/825067/topic/3983252
>
> Even though I am not experienced with using Haskell myself, I recognize
> the potential of using this language in the context of systems
> development. E.g., it plays a pivotal role in the seL4 verification
> project at NICTA, and I have been impressed by the work of Mark P. Jones
> and his group at OGI/PDX with conducting the House project. We listed
> this project idea because we realize that HalVM (or in a broader sense,
> Haskell) should receive our attention at some time in the future.
>
> Do you think that porting GHC to Genode is a necessity? I expected that
> GHC could just be used to cross-compile code. So only the Haskell
> runtime has to be ported. But as I said, I lack profound knowledge in
> this area.
>
> Are you somehow involved in the development of HalVM?
>
> Regards
> Norman
>
> On 03/24/2011 07:29 PM, Thomas DuBuisson wrote:
>> I'm curious - who added all the language-specific topics?
>> Specifically the HaLVM?  Has anyone talked to Adam Wick about porting
>> HaLVM to Genode or is this more of an off-hand "that would be nice"
>> item in the list?  Also, wouldn't it be more sensible to say "port GHC
>> to the a Genode platform" or are there HaLVM-specific features you're
>> wanting like the redevouslib for page flipping?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Thomas
>
> --
> Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
> Genode Labs
>
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