[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: Harpy 0.4 - Runtime code generation for x86 machine code

[Martin Grabmueller]

We are pleased to announce the release of Harpy 0.4, a library for
runtime code generation for x86 machine code.

Harpy is available from Hackage:

http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/harpy-0.4

Also see Harpy's homepage, which features two tutorials and access to
the darcs repo (and to the Haddock documentation, until it is available
from Hackage, too):

http://uebb.cs.tu-berlin.de/harpy/

Harpy is supposed to be built with GHC 6.8 and GHC 6.6 (with Cabal 1.2
or greater). Please report any build problems you encounter.

This release features the following additions and fixes:

- New convenience top-level module "Harpy", which re-exports
Harpy.CodeGenMonad, Harpy.Call and Harpy.X86Assembler

- It is now possible to override Harpy's automatic code buffer
management. The new field 'customCodeBuffer' in the type
'CodeGenConfig' can be set to 'Just (buf, size)', where 'buf' is a
pointer to a memory region of 'size' bytes. Harpy will then use the
supplied code buffer and will not perform any automatic code buffer
allocation on overflow. Overflow checking is still performed and
will result in an exception in the CodeGen monad.

- When using the high-level assembler in X86Assembler, the code buffer
is automatically protected from overflow.

- Floating point operations added to X86Assembler (only for double
operands yet).

- Preliminary support for SSE instructions. Currently, only the
packed and scalar floating-point arithmetic operations are supported
(both in the low-level module Harpy.X86CodeGen and as methods in
Harpy.X86Assembler)

- Code buffer default size has been increased from 128 to 4096 bytes.

- The CodeGenMonad fails when a label is defined twice.

- It is now possible to associate names with labels, using the new
operation newNamedLabel. The given names will show up in the
disassembly, which makes debugging of generated code much easier.

- The doc directory contains a second, slightly larger tutorial now.

- The examples/evaluator directory contains a small example
interpreter for arithmetic expressions, which translates expressions
entered at the keayboard to machine code on the fly. This is the
demo program we presented at the Haskell Workshop 2007.

Happy Haskell Hacking with Harpy,

Martin and Dirk

[Martin Grabmueller]

[Austin Seipp]

> - When using the high-level assembler in X86Assembler, the code buffer
> is automatically protected from overflow.

This one update alone is worth the whole upgrade; while experimenting
with Harpy in several of my own personal compiler-related projects,
the necessity of ensureBufferSize was a major limitation in code
generation since I found it did nothing but litter the resulting asm and
distract from the actual code generation (considering I figure the
assembler could count the bytes a lot easier than I could.)

Great work on a great library. I have already installed it and
definitely will be putting it to use in the near future :)

--
"It was in the days of the rains that their prayers went up,
not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords or the spinning
of prayer wheels, but from the great pray-machine in the
monastery of Ratri, goddess of the Night."
Roger Zelazny
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