The hermit and hermit-shell programs don't work on GHC 8

[roboguy13]

The plugin itself seems to work okay, but GHC no longer recognizes the flag -fsimple-list-literals (which the hermit and hermit-shell executables pass to ghc). I am going to put in a check to only pass that flag if the GHC version < 8 (for the time being at least).

Is this alright to do? I don't know much about this flag and I can't seem to find much documentation on it. I also can't find any discussion about why it was removed.

[roboguy13]

I went ahead and made this change in cc58c11

[xich]

For some reason the flag was removed in:

ghc/ghc@0db0594

We should probably clamor to have it added back. It prevents list literals from desugaring directly to foldr/build applications. (I've never really understood why they do that in the desugarer instead of via rewrite rules anyway.)

[cartazio]

bump :)

[cartazio]

is there a branch i can install?

[roboguy13]

@cartazio If you don't need -fsimple-list-literals, then the current master branch should work (cc58c11 should prevent GHC versions >= 8 from using that flag). If you do need it, it will probably be necessary to get the GHC team to add it back into GHC.