External Core is broken

[KirstenChevalier]

$ ghc -fext-core Main.hs
$ ghc -fglasgow-exts Main.hcr
ghc-6.5: panic! (the `impossible' happened, GHC version 6.5):
	tcIfaceGlobal (local): not found:
    Main.main{v rrl}
    []

Please report it as a compiler bug to glasgow-haskell-bugs@haskell.org,
or http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghc/.

Main.hs consists of: main = putStr "Hello world!"

I'll fix this myself if I still have commit access; I just want to have a record of it.

[igloo]

6.6 and HEAD both give:

<no location info>:
    1: Parse error
:
  main :: base:GHC.IOBase.IO base:GHC.Base.Z0T =
    base:System.IO.putStr
    (base:GHC.Base.unpac

[igloo]

Aaron Tomb and Tim Chevalier are working on this for 6.8.

[simonmar]

Optimistically hoping that we might get external core working in 6.10.

[tim]

Optimism is always good. I'll see how Aaron is doing on this. -Tim

[tim]

Here's the state of things: The output path (printing out External Core) should work in the HEAD. I am currently trying to verify that and to update the ext-core documentation.

The input path (reading in External Core) is a difficult problem. Aaron and I are both punting on it, for the immediate future. I would be happy to go into the deep reasons why this is hard, but I think you may know already, and am not sure how important this is to anyone.

I am going to update the GHC manual to reflect that the input path isn't working and there are no immediate plans to fix it.

- Tim

[michalt]

Update the GHC version mentioned in the user guide.

[zzo38]

I want to be able to replace the entire front-end, so it could help if you can load external core files produced by the replaced front-end program