These may be controversial. They are certainly not good for everybody,
but in my opinion better than the GHC default (unlimited memory,
single processor), especially for beginners:
- In Haskell, it's unfortunately somewhat easy to allocate infinite
amounts of memory. In the default setting, this can grind the entire
system virtually to a halt by driving everything into swap. This
is a huge frustration. (Yeah, Matlab likes to do this too, but that
should be no benchmark...)
With a memory cap, this will simply crash the program. Especially
in Jupyter, that's not a big deal since the kernel can easily be
restarted without losing any work.
- ̶6̶4̶0̶k 3 GiB should be enough for most beginner-relevant
IHaskell applications, but should fit in most computers' RAM or
at least reach the limit quickly after entering swap space.
- I see no reason to restrict the runtime to a single processor.
Almost all machines today have multiple cores, and we're linking
to the `-threaded` runtime anyway. For some applications it's
basically necessary to use more than one thread for properly
responsive operation, including my
[dynamic-plot](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/dynamic-plot).
- Two processors should be modest enough to not substantially
slow down any modern system.
Power users can of course always disable the memory cap and choose
more processors, through e.g.
ihaskell install --use-rtsopts="-N12"
As per #716, GHC-7 support has at the moment no priority. Use the GHC7 tag
for the last version that retains the original GHC-7.10 support.
https://github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell/releases/tag/GHC7
(However, it is still quite feasible to support GHC-7.10 in master, see
#747.)
In `haskell-src-exts-1.17`, `Module` was not parameterised yet, so trying
to compile with that version gives
src/IHaskell/Eval/Lint.hs:36:19:
‘SrcExts.Module’ is applied to too many type arguments
In the type ‘SrcExts.Module SrcSpanInfo’
In the type declaration for ‘ExtsModule’
