GHCi, Hugs (was: Mixture ...)

[Koen Claessen]

Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

 | Incidentally, GHCi is just about working. It acts as
 | a compiler with a built-in 'make' too.

Great!

 | Mixed interpreted/compiled code is on the way.

This puzzles me a bit. From talking with people at the
Haskell Workshop, I understood that GHCi would only be an
interactive compiler.

The disadvantage with that is that compilation time might be
very long. But it was said that that is the price we pay.

The only advantage I can see with interpreted code is the
fact that it can be compiled (or "processed") much faster.
Will GHCi reach speeds up to Hugs level?

One bad thing with Hugs is that, for large systems, the
loading/processing time gets longer, and, worse, is repeated
every time one loads the system. This is especially bad when
using "runhugs". Hopefully GHCi will work better in that
case!

Another thing that worries me is that Hugs will die. Not
only because I like Hugs a lot, but also that it is yet
another Haskell system that is dying. Soon we will just have
GHC and NHC left. (I have to consider HBC as dead by now,
since nobody is fixing bug reports.)

I know of nobody who is starting to implement a Haskell
compiler from scratch. What do people think: is this
a worrying situation?

Regards,
Koen.

--
Koen Claessen         http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~koen
phone:+46-31-772 5424      mailto:koen@cs.chalmers.se
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Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden