GHC RTS notes

May 30, 2014 - Tagged as: haskell, ghc.

Someone on HN shared this class notes of Stanford’s “Functional Systems in Haskell” class. Most of the stuff is very basic but sections 16 and 17 are very useful for me since they’re related with GHC internals which I’m currently studying.

You can see slides of Section 17 here.

These are probably only up-to-date reading materials about GHC RTS you can find. (unless you count source code as a reading material ;_; )

Some other useful GHC Wiki pages that I find useful: (validness of these for current GHC is not guaranteed, but theoretic stuff should be still valid)

• PrimOps
• Function calls
• The layout of heap objects
• Layout of the stack
• The Haskell Execution Model
• STG by example
• Debugging GHC-compiled code with gdb (I hope you don’t really need this!)
• Debugging the runtime system (same as above)
• The Garbage Collector
• Generational GC page of Mono project – not really Haskell, but I think it’s a good source to understand GC concepts that is related with GHC’s GC implementation.

Now I can close my browser tabs in peace…

Bonus content: Here’s a horror story that is probably related with a GHC RTS bug and making progress in my work impossible.

EDIT: Someone on GHC IRC channel shared his masters thesis about GHC stack traces, even if you’re not interested in stack traces I think it contains lots of useful information about GHC compilation pipeline.

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