DriFT

I tried out DriFT recently, and was most impressed, it has the feel of a program that hasn't had much love recently, but thats ok, its still a very useful program.

Firstly there is no easy way to compile it on Windows - its not hard, its just not obvious either. For reference the steps are 1) cd src, 2) ren Version.hs.in Version.hs, 3) ghc --make Drift.hs. For those Windows users who don't want to do that, I've shoved up a binary on my Windows distribution page. Its certainly not hard, but its not as easy as Cabal based thingies.

Once you've done that, "drift -r File.hs" produces the goods, in a very straight forward way. What I wanted was a deriving Binary, with a loadBinary and a saveBinary interface. DriFT offers two separate binary output modes, Binary and GhcBinary - I wanted to use it in Hugs, but a bit of experimentation showed that GhcBinary has a nicer output, so I jumped with that. Once thats done I wanted to combine it with the Binary library to do the actual serialisation - there is one in the repo but it seems to have not been given the attention it needs, so was easier to write my own. See this file in the Yhc repo for how I did it - the answer is not very nicely, but quite workable.

With all this done, now Yhc spits out Core in binary, but more importantly my PhD program now has binary cache's - changing some operations from 30 seconds to 2 seconds, which is nice :)