The project is NOT dead
Hi all, I just wanted to let everyone know that even though I have been silent for quite a while, and rather busy I have been working on it. I have the modifications on Cabal done, and almost done with those on Cabal-Install. Various small bug fixes and I’m working on improving the speed of it all. I’ll post another video soon.
I’ve also upgraded the internal ghc from the 6.13 internal snapshot I’ve been using to the released GHC 7. This is turns out to be a quite annoying upgrade, the RTS seems to segfault randomly and code that used to compile on 6.x no longer compiles on 7. But as far as I can tell, it should.
In any case, this means all of the marshaling code has to be regenerated, which means I have to change the code generated by my tool. I’m also rewriting the way the DLLs are loaded. They’re currently loaded in the same/default address space as the IDE. The problem is, when GHC panics, for whatever reason, the RTS is forced to quit and takes everything with it. I haven’t found anyway to stop this, so I’m working on some kind of process isolation. This is unfortunately a design error on my part, I always figured that a ghc panic was just an exception and did not terminate the rts.
I’ve promised a beta a lot, so I won’t do it this time, I initially planned on releasing the source along with a first release since I don’t think it’s wise for multiple people to work on the core interactions, but If I don’t make that by September, I’ll just publish what I have so that others can help if they want to.
Visual studio 2010 sp1 is coming out “soon” as well. This should fix a few of the problems I’ve been having. (yay). And in 2012 the next major release of visual studio (don’t worry, it’ll be done before that 
). Barring any major api changes, it’ll be easy to support it and any following versions of visual studio.
But to reiterate, the project is not dead, far from it. I just have a lot of work to do, some problems to solve.
Posted on January 28, 2011, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Hey, how is the project going? I had been following your progress with great interest, but you stopped updating. I would be really interested in seeing a demo, even though you still have a lot of features you want to add. I’d even consider contributing, if that’s what the project needs to keep going.
Hi Keith,
Well the bigest reasons I hadn’t worked on it for a while was that my thesis took priority (that’s now done) and that I was waiting for visual studio 2010 SP1(also released now). I’m currently finishing up work on the library I use to create the marshalling information. It took some time to update that and make the interfaces it generates stable. As soon as I finish that (coming week) I’ll start working on rewriting of visual haskell to support SP1.
Sure, I’d be happy to accept any help. Did you have a particular part you wanted to help with? As in, the C# vsix side or the Haskell side?
Let me know what you need to get done before you can release a beta, and I’ll tell you if any of it looks like something I can handle. I’d also be happy just to try it out to find bugs and performance issues. I’m mostly just interested in seeing this project get released, since it looks very useful.
Count me in for any help you need in testing, would be glad to help.