Bootstrapping 6

The build with the SPARC native code generator went through. Tried to run the test suite. For some reason when the compiler panics, the test framework runs off and tries to consume all available memory - like a fork bomb. Not sure why, maybe it was built wrong. Ended up just running individual tests by hand.

Ah, the joy of debugging assembly code. Fixed one problem where bad instructions were being generated. If you have LD [%f26 + ... ], %l1 then that's easy to find, because you can't use float regs for addressing.

Found a program from the test suite that seg faulted and spent some time reducing it to a smaller test case.

main = print (dude (1, 2))
dude xx
 = case xx of
   (x, y)    -> y

Seems to work, but

main = sum2 [1,2]
sum2 xx
 = case xx of
    []        -> 0
    (x:xs)    -> x + sum2 xs

always returns 0, no matter what size the list being summed is.

Spent about an hour staring at the STG, Cmm and NCG code, but couldn't see anything obviously wrong. Noticed that the current NCG doesn't use branch delay slots, there's a comment in the code saying that doing so would confuse the register allocator. This'll be a first port of call for optimization once the NCG is working again.

On the other hand, to compile the sum2 program above with -O0, GCC used 420 instructions but the NCG used only 361 (doesn't actually work though).

I'm finding it hugely useful to have the via-c path still in place. Besides the obvious fact that I can still compile the libraries with it, it's comforting to know that the Cmm code is good, and I can just concentrate on the Cmm -> Asm pass. All the tricky dynamic pointer tagging and whatnot is expressed in Cmm, which makes life a lot easier for me. It's also good to have multiple -O flags, because it's an easy way to create wibbles in the Cmm code when diagnosing bugs.

Got bored staring at assembly code, and went back to find a better test case. Ended up with:

main = print (up 0)
up x
 = case x of
  0 -> x

Note that up also takes a Num dictionary. Got:

Main: internal error: stg_ap_pp_ret
    (GHC version 6.11.20090105 for sparc_sun_solaris2)
    Please report this as a GHC bug:  http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug
Abort (core dumped)

Bingo! Assertions in the RTS code are my new best friends.