Trouble building applications with Haskell GLUT and freeglut on OS X with GHC 7.10.1

[jtdaugherty]

When I depend on the GLUT Haskell package (2.6 or newer) on GHC 7.10.1 on OS X 10.9.5, the GLUT package builds and installs successfully, but applications that depend on GLUT fail during cabal install with this kind of linking error:

<command line>: can't load .so/.DLL for: .../.cabal-sandbox/lib/x86_64-osx-ghc-7.10.1/GLUT_99KmPk9UqZy96uvbsgIYcH/libHSGLUT-2.6.0.1-0sykGmIsSqkEsQwajDtfCI-ghc7.10.1.dylib (dlopen(.../.cabal-sandbox/lib/x86_64-osx-ghc-7.10.1/GLUT_99KmPk9UqZy96uvbsgIYcH/libHSGLUT-2.6.0.1-0sykGmIsSqkEsQwajDtfCI-ghc7.10.1.dylib, 5):
  Symbol not found: _glutBitmap8By13
  Referenced from: .../.cabal-sandbox/lib/x86_64-osx-ghc-7.10.1/GLUT_99KmPk9UqZy96uvbsgIYcH/libHSGLUT-2.6.0.1-0sykGmIsSqkEsQwajDtfCI-ghc7.10.1.dylib
  Expected in: flat namespace
 in .../.cabal-sandbox/lib/x86_64-osx-ghc-7.10.1/GLUT_99KmPk9UqZy96uvbsgIYcH/libHSGLUT-2.6.0.1-0sykGmIsSqkEsQwajDtfCI-ghc7.10.1.dylib)

I'm not sure whether this is GHC's fault or an interaction between OS X, GHC 7.10.1, etc., but this seemed like a good place to report this.

[jtdaugherty]

It might also be worth mentioning that this occurs when trying to compile a module that uses template haskell.

[svenpanne]

Do you have an example which fails without using TH?

[jakzale]

Same problem. GLUT 2.7.0.0, GHC 7.10.1, OSX 10.10.3.

Occurs when trying to load GLUT to GHCi.
$ ghci -package GLUT

I tried loading the OSX's GLUT.framework manually:
$ ghci -framework GLUT -package GLUT
but it produces the same error message.

To be sure I checked the OSX's GLUT.framework, it does contain the _glutBitmap8By13 symbol.

[svenpanne]

OK, so this seems to be unrelated to TH and to the specific Mac OS X version. Do you have GHC 7.8.3 or 7.8.4 on your Mac to check if this is a GHC 7.10 regression? In the meantime I'll try to get 7.10 running on a Mac, but this might take some time, normally I develop on Windows + Linux only, so some help would be appreciated.

[jakzale]

I checked it under GHC 7.8.4 and
$ ghci -package GLUT
works fine (loads the package and shows the prompt).

[svenpanne]

Thanks for the quick reply! So this really seems to be a GHC regression, and there's probably not much I can do about it. I'll try to find some hints in the various Haskell mailing lists, maybe there is some workaround. I don't think there's something special about GLUT, so other people probably already reported similar problems with other libraries.

[jtdaugherty]

Thanks for looking into this, everyone! I haven't had time to respond since I originally filed this, and since it was unclear which piece of the toolchain was responsible for this issue, this seemed like a good guess as to where to file a bug and start looking. :)

@svenpanne, my intuition was also that this probably has nothing specifically to do with GLUT, and the situation isn't helped by the fact that googling for my specific linking error yields results that are non-Haskell-related and many years old.

I originally ran into this on a machine where GHC 7.8 worked fine but 7.10 yielded this behavior, to add to @jakzale's findings.

[svenpanne]

The consensus seems to be that this is a GHC 7.8.4 => 7.10.1 regression, so I'll close this issue. If there are strong indicators that this is really caused by the GLUT package, then feel free to re-open this issue.

[Rydgel]

@svenpanne So there is basically nothing I can do except rollback to 7.8.4?
Is there a bug report filled to GHC for this? I can make one if needed.

Can this be related to this: haskell/cabal#2330

[svenpanne]

To be honest, I don't have a clue if this is a Cabal problem or a GHC problem, and I don't have a Mac to test any kind of hypothesis, So your best bet is to ask on the ghc-users mailing list and/or open a bug on GHC's trac and Cabal's issue tracker... :-/ It would be good to know what causes this, and if there is a workaround which I might be able to incorporate in the GLUT package.

[GeorgeCo]

Rydgel

It would be great if you could file a ghc bug for 7.10.1, putting the word regression in the subject and stating that we would like it fixed by 7.10.3. 7.10.2 is about to ship. I have a Mac and would be happy to also test any fixes from ghc

[Rydgel]

This GHC bug looks a lot like our problem: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10322
Hopefully it is fixed in the soon to be released 7.10.2.

[rwbarton]

This is actually https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10458, and not OS-specific.