⚠️ DISCONTINUATION OF PROJECT - This project will no longer be maintained by Intel. Intel has ceased development and contributions including, but not limited to, maintenance, bug fixes, new releases, or updates, to this project. Intel no longer accepts patches to this project. If you have an ongoing need to use this project, are interested in independently developing it, or would like to maintain patches for the open source software community, please create your own fork of this project.

The Functional Language Research Compiler

The Functional Language Research Compiler (FLRC) was designed to be a general compiler framework for functional languages. The only supported compiler that is being released is a Haskell Research Compiler (HRC). The overall compilation pipeline is pictured in the following diagram:

Installation

FLRC requires FLRC-LIB to be installed prior to its installation. Other software required are autoconf/automake, pkg-config, the MLton compiler, and a C/C++ compiler.

All released code has only been tested to work on x86 64-bit Linux distros, although they were originally written for x86 32-bit Windows. At least 4GB of free memory is advised for compiling FLRC.

To install:

sh bootstrap.sh
./configure --prefix=${PREFIX}
make && make install

If you had flrc-lib installed at a non-standard location, there may be a pkgconfig error. This can be easily fixed by setting the correct PKG_CONFIG_PATH as follows (before running the bootstrap.sh and configure commands again):

# With PREFIX already set to where flrc-lib is installed, do:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=${PREFIX}/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

In the process, it will also automatically download a version of MLton compiler's source to extract some SML libraries. Once the installation is finished, a binary command hrc and some runtime headers and libraries can be found under the given ${PREFIX} path.

Usage

To actually compile a Haskell program, we'll also need a patched version of GHC. See Building and Using GHC with HRC for more information, including how to compile and run flrc-benchmarks.

To get a list of compiler options, call the compiler with any invalid option (e.g. -help).

For example, to list the flrc options:

hrc -help

To list the flrc expert options:

hrc -expert -help

One can also pass runtime options to the executable compiled by HRC. Options are passed in the form:

./[executable] @PPiler [opts]* -- [normal arguments]

These options must come before any program options, and only one @PPiler section is supported. A list of options can be obtained by passing any invalid option (e.g. -help). Currently, there are options for the number of threads to run in the futures back end, and to set the initial and max heap size for the conservative GC.

Questions

FLRC is open sourced as is. We at Intel Labs are no longer actively working on this compiler. Please use the issue tracker if you have questions.

Related Publication

Neal Glew, Tim Sweeney, and Leaf Petersen. 2013. A multivalued language with a dependent type system. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Dependently-typed programming (DTP '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25-36.

Hai Liu, Neal Glew, Leaf Petersen, and Todd A. Anderson. 2013. The Intel labs Haskell research compiler. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Haskell (Haskell '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 105-116.

Leaf Petersen, Todd A. Anderson, Hai Liu, and Neal Glew. 2013. Measuring the Haskell Gap. In Proceedings of the 25th symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages (IFL '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Pages 61 , 12 pages.

Leaf Petersen, Dominic Orchard, and Neal Glew. 2013. Automatic SIMD vectorization for Haskell. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming (ICFP '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25-36.

Neal Glew and Leaf Petersen. 2012. Type-Preserving Flow Analysis and Interprocedural Unboxing (Extended Version). Tech Report.

Leaf Petersen and Neal Glew. 2012. GC-Safe interprocedural unboxing. In Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Compiler Construction (CC'12), Michael O'Boyle (Ed.). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 165-184.

License

This software carries a BSD style license. See LICENSE_INFO for more information.