Short Update

In the style of a fellow Summer Haskeller I enumerate below my current headache sources.

• C-- I got two prim ops implemented in GHC, one is for retrieving the info table pointer of a closure and another to retrieve the payload. All in all, C-- coding withouth knowing C--
• Dealing with Pointers I've been reading the code from FPS to get a better idea of how to work with this kind of stuff. The payload of a closure is retrieved as a tuple consisting of an array of pointers (to other closures) and a bytearray. Skimming through the FPS code (now called Data.ByteString) helped me a lot and now I got the bytearray side of the tuple sorted.
• Debugging the beast Maybe in an exercise of naivety, I hoped to be able to complete the project withouth resorting to gdb. After all, it debugging the beast is well known to be scary. The current situation is that if well the bytearray thing is working, I cannot say the same about the array of closure pointers. All I got for now are segfaults and no clue.

If you want to know a bit more about what exactly I am working on, follow this discussion in the Glasgow Haskell Mailing List.

On a side note, Simon Marlow has set up a Darcs repository at darcs.haskell.org for the nine of us. I haven't still given it a thought, but probably I will have to branch the entire GHC repo in there. I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do.