Simple usage
Quickstart
To enter an environment without cloning this repository you can run:
nix-shell https://github.com/alpmestan/ghc.nix/archive/master.tar.gz
Building GHC
These commands assume you have cloned this repository
to ~/ghc.nix
. default.nix
has many parameters, all
of them optional. You should take a look at default.nix
for more details.
$ echo "BuildFlavour = quick" > mk/build.mk
$ cat mk/build.mk.sample >> mk/build.mk
$ nix-shell ~/ghc.nix/ --run './boot && ./configure $CONFIGURE_ARGS && make -j4'
# works with --pure too
Note that we passed $CONFIGURE_ARGS
to ./configure
. While this is
technically optional, this argument ensures that configure
knows where the
compiler's dependencies (e.g. gmp
, libnuma
, libdw
) are found, allowing
the compiler to be used even outsite of nix-shell
. For convenience, the
nix-shell
environment also exports a convenience command, configure_ghc
,
which invokes configure
as indicated.
You can alternatively use Hadrian to build GHC:
$ nix-shell ~/ghc.nix/
# from the nix shell:
$ ./boot && ./configure $CONFIGURE_ARGS
# example hadrian command: use 4 cores, build a 'quickest' flavoured GHC
# and place all the build artifacts under ./_mybuild/.
$ hadrian/build.sh -j4 --flavour=quickest --build-root=_mybuild
# you could also ask hadrian to boot and configure for you, with -c
# if you have never used cabal-install on your machine, you will likely
# need to run the following before the hadrian command:
$ cabal update
ghcide
Using You can also use ghc.nix
to provide the right version of ghcide
if you
want to use ghcide
whilst developing on GHC. In order to do so, pass the withIde
argument to your nix-shell
invocation.
nix-shell ~/.ghc.nix --arg withIde true
./validate
Running $ nix-shell ~/ghc.nix/ --pure --run 'THREADS=4 ./validate'
See other flags of validate
by invoking ./validate --help
or just by reading its source code. Note that ./validate --slow
builds the compiler in debug mode which has the side-effect of disabling performance tests.
Building and running for i686-linux from x86_64-linux
It's trivial!
$ nix-shell ~/ghc.nix/ --arg nixpkgs '(import <nixpkgs> {}).pkgsi686Linux'
TODO
- We currently can't just invoke
nix-build
(#1) - We do not support all the cross compilation machinery that
head.nix
from nixpkgs supports. - Some tests actually break with GHCs built with the first command above.