Documenting GHC

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| > As a user of GHC, I would vote for a full two-month delay in
| > the next release of GHC to allow the GHC team to devote
| > two months of their time exclusively to writing documentation.
| 
| While it would be lovely to be able to do that, in reality both Simon PJ
| and myself work in a research lab and it would be hard for us to take
| two months out to write compiler internals documentation.  We try to
| write docs when we can, e.g. I recently wrote a bunch of stuff about the
| GC internals on the wiki:

Another way in which we try to document things is by writing papers.  For example I am elbows-deep in a paper about the new dataflow analysis and rewrite engine in the back end.  And another about the new type inference engine.   Not every aspect of GHC has a paper about it, and the papers are not always up to date wrt the implementation, but they are at least carefully written and reviewed.

As Simon says, GHC is a collaborative project.  We have two kinds of collaborative documentation:

* User-oriented documentation lives on the HaskellWiki, here, under "Collaborative documentation"
	http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC

* Developer-oriented documentation (developers of GHC itself, that is) lives on 
  the GHC Trac Wiki, here, both in the main Commentary and under Collaborative documentation
	http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary

Perhaps you feel you know something about X but not everything.  Please still write about it; we'd be  happy to review your draft, and it's usually better than nothing about X.

Simon