The Haskell Language Server (HLS) codebase has a lot of CPP conditionals. A lot of them look like this:

#if MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,2,0)

which says that the version of the ghc library has to be at least 9.2; or this

#if MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,2,0) && !MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,3,0)

which says that the version of the ghc library has to be between 9.2 and 9.3; or this

#if __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ < 902

which says that the version of GHC itself has to be less than 9.2.

When we stop supporting a version of GHC, many of these conditonals become obsolete. If we have code like this:

x = 
#if MIN_VERSION_GHC(9,2,0)
  1
#else
  2
#endif

then once we only support GHC 9.2 and above, the conditional will always evaluate to true, and so we can simplify it away. Until now, we’ve mostly done this by hand. But surely there should be a way to do this automatically!

What we want to do is similar to partial evaluation: we want to evaluate some of the CPP, given values for some of the inputs, and get as a result a reduced version of our input.

There are several tools that do this:

  • unifdef: https://dotat.at/prog/unifdef/
  • cppp: https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/cppp.html
  • coan: https://coan2.sourceforge.net/index.php

I tried unifdef and coan, as they are packaged on NixOS, which I use.

The first hurdle is that neither tool really has good support for function macros like MIN_VERSION_ghc. They’re mostly focused on simple macros that are either defined or undefined, or set to a particular value.

My solution to this is grimy but it works: replace all the function macros with constants using sed. That is, we replace everything that looks like the MIN_VERSION_ghc macro that we want to replace with some simple macro like ALWAYS_TRUE that we can define later. Now we have not only a pre-processor partial evaluator but a pre-processor pre-processor!

This works fairly well. Both unifdef and coan were able to remove MIN_VERSION_ghc macros and the code that they were guarding. However, coan was significantly better in that it was able to simplify conditionals like the second example, turning MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,2,0) && !MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,3,0) into just !MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,3,0) From this point on I just used coan.

The steps looked like this:

sed -i -e 's/MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,0,[0-9]*)/ALWAYS_TRUE/g' $FILE 
coan source -r -DALWAYS_TRUE=1 $FILE
  1. Replace MIN_VERSION_ghc(9,0,<anything>) with ALWAYS_TRUE
  2. Run coan to evaluate with ALWAYS_TRUE set to 1

You can then use grep and xargs to run this on all Haskell files.

The final problem is __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ conditionals. coan can set __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ to a value, but we don’t actually want that. If we set __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ to 903, then that will remove any __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ < 903 conditionals (false) but also __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ < 904 (true), and so on. We would really want to tell coan that __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ is some constant greater than 902, but not exactly what it is.

In the end, I just did the same trick of replacing the conditionals with ALWAYS_TRUE. In principle, there could be all kinds of __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ conditionals with various comparison operators, but in practice there aren’t that many, and a quick grep through the codebase will identify them.

Overall this was very successful! Normally doing this would have taken me a couple of hours, and in this case there was a lot to do and I was rather dreading it. Automation to the rescue!