Current GHC core documentation.

[Simon Marlow]

On 03/08/2009 15:54, Richard Kelsall wrote:
> This page
>
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/documentation.html
>
> has a link to the September 2001 (Draft for GHC 5.02) document
> describing GHC Core (in what is for me user-hostile .ps.gz format.)
>
> And this page
>
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/ext-core.html
>
> promises an easier format PDF document, but the link is broken.
>
>
> I did eventually find the 1st April 2009 GHC 6.10 document here
>
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.10.2/html/ext-core/core.pdf
>
> and a bit on this page
>
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/options-debugging.html#id468571
>
> about GHC core. I haven't read these yet, but could I ask whether they
> constitute the complete current documentation for GHC core? (I'm just
> curious to get a flavour of what core does.)

There's also the commentary page:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Compiler/CoreSynType

which is supposed to be the canonical place for documentation about 
GHC's internal Core datatype.

"External Core" is slightly different: it refers to the external 
representation of Core that you get from the -fext-core flag. 
Round-tripping via External Core is supposed to be non-lossy, though, so 
External Core retains everything in the original Core.

Cheers,
	Simon