[darcs-users] GHC segfaulting when building darcss

[Simon Marlow]

Ian Lynagh wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 08:13:31PM +0100, Reinier Lamers wrote:
>> Hmmm, wasn't Haskell supposed to make segfaults a thing of the past?
> 
> You can still get segfaults from at least:
> * compiler bugs
> * runtime system bugs
> * incorrect use of FFI
> * various unsafe Haskell primitives
> 

In particular, we had a bug in 6.8.3 and earlier with buffer management 
in the code that parses the module header.  On Windows this results in 
the dreaded "Bad interface file" error that randomly appears, but I 
imagine it's possible to get segfaults too.  If I recall correctly, the 
bug was aggravated by having long comments before the 'module' keyword 
in a source file, or lots of {-# OPTIONS #-} pragmas.

Cheers,
	Simon