Two of the fixes were in the custom version of the binary package. We
should get rid of it at some point, to reduce the maintenance burden.
The third fix was to add new version constraints for happy and alex in
gf.cabal. New versions of them are needed because of the ugly, low-level,
GHC-specific code they produce need to be different for GHC 7.8.
More fixes might be needed for -server mode, but the cgi package is not
compatible with GHC 7.8 at the moment, so it will have to wait.
If the C run-time library is compiled and installed on your system, you can now
do 'cabal configure -fc-runtime' to get the following extras:
+ The haskell binding to the C run-time library will be included in the
PGF library (so you can import it in Haskell applications).
Documentation on the new modules will be included when you run
'cabal haddock'.
+ The new command 'pgf-shell', implemented on top of haskell binding to
the C run-time system.
+ Three new commands in the web API: c-parse, c-linearize and
c-translate. Their interfaces are similar to the corresponding commands
without the "c-" prefix, but they should be considered preliminary.
Some backwards incompatible changes were made to the PGF file format after
the release of GF 3.5. This patch adds a module for reading PGF files in the
old format.
This means that old PGF files on the grammaticalframework.org server will
continue to work after we install the latest version of GF.
* The old way: a user hook in Setup.hs
* The new way: specify it in gf.cabal
* The test suite is now called gf-tests, and it runs testsuite/run.hs.
* You can run it manually with 'runhaskell testsuite/run.hs'. It also runs,
together with rgl-tests, when you do 'cabal test'
* Currently only 9 of 34 tests pass. Many failures have silly causes:
- Error messages that look slightly different
- Same output but in a different order
- Absolute paths in output
This means that the -old-comp and -new-comp flags are not recognized anymore.
The only functional difference is that printnames were still normalized with
the old partial evaluator. Now that is done with the new partial evaluator.
1. The default encoding is changed from Latin-1 to UTF-8.
2. Alternate encodings should be specified as "--# -coding=enc", the old
"flags coding=enc" declarations have no effect but are still checked for
consistency.
3. A transitional warning is generated for files that contain non-ASCII
characters without specifying a character encoding:
"Warning: default encoding has changed from Latin-1 to UTF-8"
4. Conversion to Unicode is now done *before* lexing. This makes it possible
to allow arbitrary Unicode characters in identifiers. But identifiers are
still stored as ByteStrings, so they are limited to Latin-1 characters
for now.
5. Lexer.hs is no longer part of the repository. We now generate the lexer
from Lexer.x with alex>=3. Some workarounds for bugs in alex-3.0 were
needed. These bugs might already be fixed in newer versions of alex, but
we should be compatible with what is shipped in the Haskell Platform.
The only use of PGF.Tree outside the PGF library was in GF.Command.Commands,
and it was eliminated by using PGF.Expr directly instead.
PGF.Paraphrase still uses PGF.Tree.
This module should not be part of the public PGF library API, and it was only
used in GF.CompileToAPI, so the code was moved there. The module defined
constFuncs and syntaxFuncs, but only syntaxFuncs was used.
+ References to modules under src/compiler have been eliminated from the PGF
library (under src/runtime/haskell). Only two functions had to be moved (from
GF.Data.Utilities to PGF.Utilities) to make this possible, other apparent
dependencies turned out to be vacuous.
+ In gf.cabal, the GF executable no longer directly depends on the PGF library
source directory, but only on the exposed library modules. This means that
there is less duplication in gf.cabal and that the 30 modules in the
PGF library will no longer be compiled twice while building GF.
To make this possible, additional PGF library modules have been exposed, even
though they should probably be considered for internal use only. They could
be collected in a PGF.Internal module, or marked as "unstable", to make
this explicit.
+ Also, by using the -fwarn-unused-imports flag, ~220 redundant imports were
found and removed, reducing the total number of imports by ~15%.
The standard binary package has improved efficiency and error handling [1], so
in the long run we should consider switching to it. At the moment, using it is
possible but not recommended, since it results in incomatible PGF files.
The modified modules from the binary package have been moved from
src/runtime/haskell to src/binary.
[1] http://lennartkolmodin.blogspot.se/2013/03/binary-07.html
The refresh pass does not correctly keep track of the scope of local variables
and can convert things like \x->(\x->x) x into \x1->(\x2->x2) x2. Fortunately,
it appears that the refresh pass is not needed anymore, so it has been removed.
* -new-comp (the new partial evaluator) is now chosen by default when you run
cabal install (or cabal configure). To revert to using the old partial
evaluator by default, use "cabal install -f-new-comp" (or
"cabal configure -f-new-comp").
* Regardless of the configured default, you can choose which partial evaluator
to use when you invoke gf by using the -new-comp or -old-comp command line
option.
* The cc command in the GF shell uses the chosen partial evaluator by default,
but you can override this by using "cc -new" or "cc -old".
The plan is that these flags will be romeved in a future version.
GF.Compile.Compute.ConcreteNew + two new modules contain a new
partial evaluator intended to solve some performance problems with the old
partial evalutator in GF.Compile.Compute.ConcreteLazy. It has been around for
a while, but is now complete enough to compile the RGL and the Phrasebook.
The old partial evaluator is still used by default. The new one can be activated
in two ways:
- by using the command line option -new-comp when invoking GF.
- by using cabal configure -fnew-comp to make -new-comp the default. In this
case you can also use the command line option -old-comp to revert to the old
partial evaluator.
In the GF shell, the cc command uses the old evaluator regardless of -new-comp
for now, but you can use "cc -new ..." to invoke the new evaluator.
With -new-comp, computations happen in GF.Compile.GeneratePMCFG instead of
GF.Compile.Optimize. This is implemented by testing the flag optNewComp in
both modules, to omit calls to the old partial evaluator from GF.Compile.Optimize
and add calls to the new partial evaluator in GF.Compile.GeneratePMCFG.
This also means that -new-comp effectively implies -noexpand.
In GF.Compile.CheckGrammar, there is a check that restricted inheritance is used
correctly. However, when -noexpand is used, this check causes unexpected errors,
so it has been converted to generate warnings, for now.
-new-comp no longer enables the new type checker in
GF.Compile.Typeckeck.ConcreteNew.
The GF version number has been bumped to 3.3.10-darcs
+ The restrictions on arbitrary IO when GF is running in restricted mode is now
enforced in the types.
+ This hopefully also solves an intermittent problem when accessing the GF
shell through the web API provided by gf -server. This was visible in the
Simple Translation Tool and probably caused by some low-level bug in the
GHC IO libraries.
Introduced the function
parallelCheck :: [Check a] -> Check [a]
that runs independent checks in parallel, potentially allowing faster grammar
compilation on multi-core computers, if you run gf with +RTS -N.
However, on my dual core laptop, this seems to slow down compilation somewhat
even though CPU utilization goes up as high as 170% at times.
(This is with GF compiled with GHC 7.0.4.)
As a temporary workaround, alex is no longer invoked automatically when
building with cabal. Developers who want to modify the lexer need to run
alex on Lexer.x manually and record the modified Lexer.hs.
src/compiler/GF/Grammar/lexer/Lexer.x -- hidden from cabal
src/compiler/GF/Grammar/Lexer.hs -- update it manually
Removing "ghc-options: -O2" from gf.cabal has the following advantages:
+ Compiling GF is faster (time drops from 182s to 142s on my laptop)
+ Compiling the RGL is faster (time drops from 159s to 155s on my laptop)
+ Without the hardwired optimization level, the 'cabal configure' options
--enable-optimization=<n> and --disable-optimization work as expected
(so if you still want -O2, use --enable-optimization=2)
+ GF can be compiled with ghc-7.2.2 and ghc-7.4.1 (-O2 triggers a bug in
these versions of ghc, it seems. Another workaround, discovered by
Sergei Trofimovich, is to use -O0 in Data.Binary.)
Also moved the translation quiz from demos/TransQuiz to src/www/TransQuiz so
that it will be installed by 'cabal install' along with the other files that
are installed for use by gf -server mode.
