What does tinfo6 stands for?

Question

Working with Haskell and particularly GHC I can see tinfo6 word quite often. Mostly it appears in arch-vendor-os triple x86_64-linux-tinfo6 like if it was some sort of OS. But what really does tinfo6 mean?

Answer 1

it appears in arch-vendor-os triple x86_64-linux-tinfo6

I think you are confusing GNU target triplets with GHC target triplets. A GHC target triplet is <architecture>-<operating system>-<ABI>.

So, tinfo6 is the ABI. I don't know much about GHC, but I do remember that it has a calling convention that is not the C calling convention.

Fun fact: this calling convention can actually not be expressed in C, therefore the C backend of GHC actually calls GCC to generate assembly, then a Perl(!!!) script that is part of the GHC compiler searches for calls in the assembly code and re-writes them to the GHC calling convention; after that, the compiler will call GCC (or rather GAS) again, to assemble the object file. (This rather clever but somewhat crazy hack is one of the reasons for the push to native and LLVM backends.)

So, unfortunately, I don't know what tinfo6 means but I am pretty sure it is the name of the GHC calling convention or ABI.