The C pre-processor cpp is run over your Haskell code only if the -cpp option is given. Unless you are building a large system with significant doses of conditional compilation, you really shouldn't need it.
Define macro <foo> in the usual way. NB: does not affect -D macros passed to the C compiler when compiling via C! For those, use the -optc-Dfoo hack… (see Section 3.13.2).
Undefine macro <foo> in the usual way.
Specify a directory in which to look for #include files, in the usual C way.
The GHC driver pre-defines several macros when processing Haskell source code (.hs or .lhs files):
If defined, this means that GHC supports the language defined by the Haskell 98 report.
In GHC 4.04 and later, the __HASKELL__ macro is defined as having the value 98.
If defined to n, that means GHC supports the Haskell language defined in the Haskell report version 1.n. Currently 5. This macro is deprecated, and will probably disappear in future versions.
For version n of the GHC system, this will be #defined to 100n. So, for version 4.00, it is 400.
With any luck, __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ will be undefined in all other implementations that support C-style pre-processing.
(For reference: the comparable symbols for other systems are: __HUGS__ for Hugs and __HBC__ for Chalmers.)
NB. This macro is set when pre-processing both Haskell source and C source, including the C source generated from a Haskell module (i.e. .hs, .lhs, .c and .hc files).
This symbol is defined when pre-processing Haskell (input) and pre-processing C (GHC output). Since GHC from verion 4.00 now supports concurrent haskell by default, this symbol is always defined.
Only defined when -parallel is in use! This symbol is defined when pre-processing Haskell (input) and pre-processing C (GHC output).
Options other than the above can be forced through to the C pre-processor with the -opt flags (see Section 3.13.2).
A small word of warning: -cpp is not friendly to “string gaps”.. In other words, strings such as the following:
strmod = "\ \ p \ \ " |
don't work with -cpp; /usr/bin/cpp elides the backslash-newline pairs.
However, it appears that if you add a space at the end of the line, then cpp (at least GNU cpp and possibly other cpps) leaves the backslash-space pairs alone and the string gap works as expected.
At the moment, quite a few common C-compiler options are passed on quietly to the C compilation of Haskell-compiler-generated C files. THIS MAY CHANGE. Meanwhile, options so sent are:
| -ansi | do ANSI C (not K&R) |
| -pedantic | be so |
| -dgcc-lint | (hack) short for “make GCC very paranoid” |
If you are compiling with lots of foreign calls, you may need to tell the C compiler about some #include files. There is no real pretty way to do this, but you can use this hack from the command-line:
% ghc -c '-#include <X/Xlib.h>' Xstuff.lhs |
GHC has to link your code with various libraries, possibly including: user-supplied, GHC-supplied, and system-supplied (-lm math library, for example).
Link in a library named lib<FOO>.a which resides somewhere on the library directories path.
Because of the sad state of most UNIX linkers, the order of such options does matter. Thus: ghc -lbar *.o is almost certainly wrong, because it will search libbar.a before it has collected unresolved symbols from the *.o files. ghc *.o -lbar is probably better.
The linker will of course be informed about some GHC-supplied libraries automatically; these are:
| -l equivalent | description |
| -lHSrts,-lHSclib | basic runtime libraries |
| -lHS | standard Prelude library |
| -lHS_cbits | C support code for standard Prelude library |
| -lgmp | GNU multi-precision library (for Integers) |
If you are using a Haskell “system library” (e.g., the POSIX library), just use the -package posix option, and the correct code should be linked in.
Where to find user-supplied libraries… Prepend the directory <dir> to the library directories path.
Tell the linker to avoid shared libraries.
By default, immediately after linking an executable, GHC verifies that the pieces that went into it were compiled with compatible flags; a “consistency check”. (This is to avoid mysterious failures caused by non-meshing of incompatibly-compiled programs; e.g., if one .o file was compiled for a parallel machine and the others weren't.) You may turn off this check with -no-link-chk. You can turn it (back) on with -link-chk (the default).
In the event you want to include ghc-compiled code as part of another (non-Haskell) program, the RTS will not be supplying its definition of main() at link-time, you will have to. To signal that to the driver script when linking, use -no-hs-main.
Notice that since the command-line passed to the linker is rather involved, you probably want to use the ghc driver script to do the final link of your `mixed-language' application. This is not a requirement though, just try linking once with -v on to see what options the driver passes through to the linker.