ghc 7.8.3 and rare architectures

After some initially positive experience with ghc-7.8-rc1 I’ve decided to upstream most of gentoo fixes.

On rare arches ghc-7.8.3 behaves a bit bad:

• ia64 build stopped being able to link itself after ghc-7.4 (gprel overflow)
• on sparc, ia64 and ppc ghc was not able to create working shared libraries
• integer-gmp library on ia64 crashed, and we had to use integer-simple

I have written a small story of those fixes here if you are curious.

TL;DR:

To get ghc-7.8.3 working nicer for exotic arches you will need to backport at least the following patches:

• integer literals trimming
• incorrect -fPIC passing to the assembler
• fixed foreign export propotype

Thank you!