ghc-lib

Copyright © 2019, Digital Asset (Switzerland) GmbH and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. SPDX-License-Identifier: (Apache-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause)

The GHC API allows you to use the GHC compiler as a library, so you can parse, analyze and compile Haskell code. The GHC API comes preinstalled with GHC, and is tied to that GHC version - if you are using GHC 8.6.3, you get version 8.6.3 of the API, and can't change it. The ghc-lib project solves that problem, letting you mix and match versions of the GHC compiler and GHC API. Why might you want that?

• Imagine you are writing a tool to work with several versions of the GHC compiler. The GHC API changes significantly between each version, so doing this would require writing a lot of C preprocessor code to support it. An alternative is to use one version of ghc-lib which works across multiple versions of GHC.
• Imagine you are modifying the GHC API or want features from GHC HEAD. With ghc-lib you can depend on the revised GHC API, without upgrading the compiler used to build everything, speeding up iteration.

The ghc-lib project provides two packages : ghc-lib-parser and ghc-lib. The ghc-lib-parser package is that subset of the GHC API that is just enough to parse Haskell code. The ghc-lib package extends (and re-exports) ghc-lib-parser with the rest. While ghc-lib provides the full GHC API, it doesn't contain a runtime system, nor does it create a package database. That means you can't run code produced by ghc-lib (no runtime), and compiling off-the-shelf code is very hard (no package database containing the base library). What you can do:

• Parse Haskell code, making ghc-lib-parser a potential replacement for haskell-src-exts. See the demo mini-hlint in this repo;
• Compile Haskell code as far as GHC's Core language, which includes renaming and type checking. See the demo mini-compile in this repo, and the carefully tailored file it compiles.

There are some downsides to ghc-lib:

• The lack of runtime means you can't run code, which includes running code at compile time, e.g. TemplateHaskell.
• While ghc-lib isn't tied to any specific GHC versions, it can only read package databases and .hi files for one particular version of GHC. That means your existing package database probably can't be consumed by ghc-lib (unless you happen to perfectly match the GHC version, in which case you could just have used the GHC API), and it doesn't ship with a package database so you'd have to painfully build your own.
• Compilation times for the ghc-lib packages are not small, taking approximately 5 minutes for each on our CI machines.

Using ghc-lib

The packages ghc-lib-parser and ghc-lib are available on Hackage, and can be used like any normal packages, e.g. cabal install ghc-lib. Since ghc-lib-parser and ghc-lib conflict perfectly with the GHC API and template-haskell, the packages are hidden by default : use the language extension PackageImports to do import "ghc-lib" ... or import "ghc-lib-parser" ... as approriate. There are two release streams within the ghc-lib name:

• Version 8.8.1 will be the version of ghc-lib produced against the released GHC 8.8.1, once it comes out;
• Version 0.20190204 is the version of ghc-lib using GHC HEAD on the date 2019-02-04.

The Hackage packages are licensed under the BSD-3-Clause license, just like GHC itself. This repo, including the examples and the script that generates ghc-lib, are licensed under the BSD-3-Clause OR Apache-2.0 license.

Creating ghc-lib

We create the packages by taking a checkout of GHC, and combining the ghc package with the various dependencies it is tightly tied to (e.g. template-haskell) in two new cabal files ghc-lib-parser.cabal and ghc-lib.cabal. These new packages depend on a few generated outputs (which we build using the GHC build system) and some Cmm files (which we hack around by editing the Haskell source, because Cabal support for Cmm files is lacking). The ghc-lib-gen directory contains a script that puts all the pieces together. Because GHC itself is capable of being bootstrapped with older GHC versions (its Stage0 build), the generated ghc-lib also compiles with multiple GHC versions.

To build ghc-lib-parser and ghc-lib you need clones of this repository and the GHC repository.

Warning : ghc-lib-parser and ghc-lib are known to work on all of MacOS, Linux and Windows. Distributions produced with cabal sdist on Linux/MacOS build on Windows, but a cabal sdist produced on Windows does not build on MacOS/Linux.

Building ghc-lib via cabal

In a bash shell, build with the following commands.

# Setup
git clone git@github.com:digital-asset/ghc-lib.git
cd ghc-lib
git clone https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc.git --recursive
# Build ghc-lib-parser
cabal run -- ghc --ghc-lib-parser
cd ghc
cabal sdist
tar xvf dist/ghc-lib-parser-*.tar.gz
cd ghc-lib-parser-*
cabal install
# Reset
cd ..
git clean -xdf && git checkout .
cd ..
# Build ghc-lib
cabal run -- ghc --ghc-lib
cd ghc
cabal sdist
tar xvf dist/ghc-lib-*.tar.gz
cd ghc-lib-*
cabal install
# Build the tests
cd ../..
(cd examples/mini-hlint && cabal build)
(cd examples/mini-compile && cabal build)

Building ghc-lib via stack

In a bash shell, build with the following commands.

git clone git@github.com:digital-asset/ghc-lib.git
cd ghc-lib && git clone --recursive https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc.git
stack setup > /dev/null 2>&1
stack build --no-terminal --interleaved-output
stack exec -- ghc-lib-gen ghc --ghc-lib-parser
cat << EOF >> stack.yaml
- ghc
EOF
stack sdist ghc --tar-dir=.
(cd ghc && git clean -xf && git checkout .)
stack exec -- ghc-lib-gen ghc --ghc-lib
stack sdist ghc --tar-dir=.
tar xvf ghc-lib-parser-0.1.0.tar.gz
tar xvf ghc-lib-0.1.0.tar.gz
mv ghc-lib-parser-0.1.0 ghc-lib-parser
mv ghc-lib-0.1.0 ghc-lib
sed '$d' stack.yaml > stack.yaml.tmp&&cp stack.yaml.tmp stack.yaml
cat << EOF >> stack.yaml
- ghc-lib-parser
- ghc-lib
EOF
stack build ghc-lib-parser --interleaved-output
stack build ghc-lib --interleaved-output
cat << EOF >> stack.yaml
- examples/mini-hlint
- examples/mini-compile
EOF
stack build mini-hlint
stack build mini-compile

# Execute the examples
stack exec mini-hlint -- examples/mini-hlint/test/MiniHlintTest.hs
stack exec mini-hlint -- examples/mini-hlint/test/MiniHlintTest_fatal_error.hs
stack exec mini-hlint -- examples/mini-hlint/test/MiniHlintTest_non_fatal_error.hs
stack exec mini-hlint -- examples/mini-hlint/test/MiniHlintTest_respect_dynamic_pragma.hs
stack exec mini-hlint -- examples/mini-hlint/test/MiniHlintTest_fail_unknown_pragma.hs
stack exec mini-compile -- examples/mini-compile/test/MiniCompileTest.hs

Releasing ghc-lib (notes for maintainers)

First prepare with:

cd ghc-lib
git clone https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc.git --recursive
cabal run -- ghc --ghc-lib-parser
cd ghc

Then edit ghc-lib-parser.cabal to fix the version number (e.g. 0.20190204) before executing:

cabal sdist

Upload dist/ghc-lib-parser-xxx.tar.gz to Hackage.

Next,

git clean -xdf && git checkout .
cd ..
cabal run -- ghc --ghc-lib
cd ghc

Then edit ghc-lib.cabal to fix the version number (e.g. 0.20190204) and constrain the ghc-lib-parser version in the build-depends section before executing:

cabal sdist

Upload dist/ghc-lib-xxx.tar.gz to Hackage.