True multi stage Haskell

Tim Sheard sheard at pdx.edu
Fri Nov 17 18:05:10 UTC 2017


After many years of hoping someone else would do this, I would like to
make GHC into a true multi-stage programming language. Here is how I
thought I might approach this.

1) Use the GHC as a library module.
2) Use the LLVM backend.

I have no experience with either of these tools.
Lets start simple, How would I write functions like

compile :: String -> IO PtrToLLVMCode  -- where the string is a small 
Haskell program.
llvmCompile :: PtrToLLVMCode -> IO PtrToMachineCode
jumpTo:: PtrToMachineCode -> IO ans   -- where ans is the "type" of the 
string.


Any thoughts on how to get started? What papers to read, examples to 
look at?

I'd love to move to some more disciplined input type, a sort of (mono) 
typed program
representation (with similar complexity) to Template Haskell Exp type.

where (Exp t) is a data structure representing a Haskell program of type t.

All offers of advice accepted. I'm trying to get started soon, and good 
advice
about what to avoid is especially welcome.  If any one wanted to help 
with this,
that would be great.

Tim Sheard



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