Using the GHC API to write an interpreter

[Christopher Done]

On 27 June 2016 at 04:11, Edward Z. Yang <ezyang at mit.edu> wrote:
> I don't understand what the bytecode format has to do here. Since
> your suggestion is to just store Core you can just compile to object
> code.

True, I could compile to either as long as I can link it dynamically.

> > Any input into this? How far away is GHC's current architecture from
> > supporting such a concept?
>
> Well, if you are going to support update you need to make sure that the
> tag information is more elaborate than what GHC currently supports
> (a type would just be a Name, which is going to get reused when you
> recompile.)

Indeed -- like in GHCi when you redefine a named thing, I'd hope to
implement an incrementing Name[n] versioning for names. But Core's AST
is trivial so it'd be easy to make this kind of transformation.