Building GHC under Illumos

I like the bleeding edge, that's why I always want to have the newest compilers for my favorite languages and Haskell is one of those languages. In this blogpost I'm going to show you how to build the latest and greatest GHC on the Illumos distribution OpenIndiana. If you don't want to build it yourself you can pick up a fairly recent version of GHC from the SFE Repository.

To make things easier let's get our hand on a GHC binary from which we can bootstrap our environment, luckily there is a package for GHC 7.0.3 for Solaris which works just fine under Illumos. Just install it and put it in your PATH environment variable.

Due to it's Solaris heritage, Illumos currently ships with a pretty outdated version of GCC. I recommend that you install the GCC provided by the SFE Repository since the shipped version causes some linking problems when dealing with the hidden attribute. If you have to use the old compiler you can get rid of this issue by using this quick and dirty patch which just gets rid of some pragmas and macros:

diff --git a/includes/Rts.h b/includes/Rts.h
index 91ec76d..adbbe54 100644
--- a/includes/Rts.h
+++ b/includes/Rts.h
@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@ extern "C" {
 // with visibility "hidden" to hide them outside the RTS shared
 // library.
 #if defined(HAS_VISIBILITY_HIDDEN)
-#define RTS_PRIVATE  GNUC3_ATTRIBUTE(visibility("hidden"))
+#define RTS_PRIVATE  //GNUC3_ATTRIBUTE(visibility("hidden"))
 #else
 #define RTS_PRIVATE  /* disabled: RTS_PRIVATE */
 #endif
diff --git a/rts/BeginPrivate.h b/rts/BeginPrivate.h
index 6471b92..1af4c90 100644
--- a/rts/BeginPrivate.h
+++ b/rts/BeginPrivate.h
@@ -6,5 +6,5 @@
        error: visibility attribute not supported in this configuration; ignored
    */
 #if defined(HAS_VISIBILITY_HIDDEN) && !defined(freebsd_HOST_OS)
-#pragma GCC visibility push(hidden)
+//#pragma GCC visibility push(hidden)
 #endif
diff --git a/rts/EndPrivate.h b/rts/EndPrivate.h
index 4cfb68f..c2e3154 100644
--- a/rts/EndPrivate.h
+++ b/rts/EndPrivate.h
@@ -1,3 +1,3 @@
 #if defined(HAS_VISIBILITY_HIDDEN) && !defined(freebsd_HOST_OS)
-#pragma GCC visibility pop
+//#pragma GCC visibility pop
 #endif

Now we are good to go. Get your hands on some fresh tarball, perhaps the latest and greatest RC. To configure your future GHC just run something like:

./configure --prefix=~/Library/GHC/version --with-gmp-includes=/usr/include/gmp

I usually install self compiled software in ~/Library/program/version. From here I can manage everything using softlinks but feel free to use any other prefix.

Be sure to run the GNU Make (gmake) command and not the Illumos one. Sadly gmake seems to be unable to handle multiple jobs when compiling GHC so our final step looks like this:

gmake && gmake install

From here on you should be able to build pretty much every version you wish for. If you pick a version that is supported by cabal-install installing additional packages from hackage is a piece of cake. I usually have more than one GHC installed, the one that is shipped with the current Haskell Platform and the latest version with all the hot new features.

Illumos has the potential to be one of the best platforms for developing Haskell since it has exquisite DTrace support. If you want to help to improve the Haskell experience on Illumos, feel free to contact me in #openindiana on freenode.