Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > Paul Rubin wrote: > > > Anyway, try googling "evil mangler" > > I know what the "evil mangler" is. It was called that because it > threw away all the principles of good software design in favour > of expediency. GHC now has a new LLVM backend which does not > depend on the evil mangler and I strongly suspect that the backend > which uses the evil mangler will be dumped in the next year or > two.
I have some more information about the replacement of the Evil Mangler. According to this paper: http://llvm.org/pubs/2010-09-HASKELLSYM-LLVM-GHC.pdf the new LLVM backend for the GHC compiler still has a mangler phase, but the new LLVM Mangler is 180 lines of heavily commented Haskell code which replaces a 2000 lines of poorly commented Perl script. Full disclosure: the Perl mangler needs to parse the GNU assembler code while the Haskell mangler only needs to operate on data structures already defined elesewhere. However, the Evil Mangler only handled a small subset of CPU architectures, while the new LLM Mangler works on the architecture independent LLVM intermediate representation. > > and ask why it wasn't done in Haskell. Same idea. > > Expediency over common sense? Ignoring the parsing issue, this shows that Haskell was certainly up to the task of doing everything the Evil Mangler was doing. Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
