[Haskell-cafe] Non-technical Haskell question

[Lennart Augustsson]

azrael at demonlords.net wrote:
> The original observation was that the compiler seems archaic. When
> asked, I gave some general comments. What I should have just said was
> that it was to much like a C compiler. Which, no matter how neat you
> think it is, is archaic.
Archaic doesn't mean that it's bad. :)


>  When I use javac every file that is created is necessary for the
> application to run. This can't be said of the ghc compiler. Having an
> excuse that this is way the C compiler does it or that this is the way
> its always been done is to poor of a reason to even argue against. If a
> file isn't needed then it shouldn't be left there. 
But given the speed of compilation with ghc I'm very happy
to have a compilation cache (the .o files) around.

One can argue that the whole concept of a compiler is archaic.
What you are interested in is running your program.  That it
it happens in several steps (compile time, link time, run time)
is just an implementation artefact.  This holds for javac too.

	-- Lennart