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Primitive Operations (PrimOps)
A PrimOp is a function that cannot be implemented in Haskell, and are provided natively by GHC. For example, adding two Int# values is provided as the PrimOp +#, and allocating a new mutable array is the PrimOp newArray#.
PrimOps? are made available to Haskell code through the virtual module GHC.Prim. This module has no implementation, and its interface never resides on disk: if GHC.Prim is imported, we use a built-in ModIface value - see ghcPrimIface in compiler/iface/LoadIface.lhs.
The primops.txt.pp file
The file compiler/prelude/primops.txt.pp includes all the information the compiler needs to know about a PrimOp, bar its actual implementation. For each PrimOp, primops.txt.pp lists:
- Its name, as it appears in Haskell code (eg. int2Integer#)
- Its type
- The name of its constructor in GHC's PrimOp data type.
- Various properties, such as whether the operation is commutable, or has side effects.
For example, here's the integer multiplication PrimOp:
primop IntegerMulOp "timesInteger#" GenPrimOp
Int# -> ByteArr# -> Int# -> ByteArr# -> (# Int#, ByteArr# #)
with commutable = True
out_of_line = True
The primops.txt.pp file is processed first by CPP, and then by the genprimopcode program (see utils/genprimopcode). genprimopcode generates the following bits from primops.txt.pp:
- Various files that are #included into compiler/prelude/PrimOp.lhs, containing declarations of data types and functions describing the PrimOps. See compiler/Makefile.
- libraries/base/GHC/PrimopWrappers.hs, a file that contains (curried) wrapper functions for each of the PrimOps, so that they are accessible from byte-code, and so that the byte-code interpreter doesn't need to implement any PrimOps at all: it just invokes the compiled ones from GHC.PrimopWrappers.
- libraries/base/GHC/Prim.hs, a source file containing dummy declarations for all the PrimOps, solely so that Haddock can include documentation for GHC.Prim in its documentation for the base package. The file GHC/Prim.hs is never actually compiled, only processed by Haddock.
Implementation of PrimOps
PrimOps are divided into two categories for the purposes of implementation: inline and out-of-line.
