[Haskell-cafe] In-place modification

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

>> btw, you doesn't need to use unix in
>> order to play with ghc HEAD - you can download compiled windows binary
> Seriously? I'm pretty sure I tried to do that and couldn't...

Seriously. Thanks to Igloo, you can even download a GHC nightly
complete with an installer! It doesn't get any easier than that :)

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/current/dist/ghc-6.7.20070706-i386-unknown-mingw32.exe

> > I did think about compiling GHC myself once. But then I found out that it's
> > not actually written in Haskell - it's written in Haskell + C + asm + Perl
> > (?!) and it's utterly *huge*...

> Perl may die soon - GHC HQ is considering retiring the registerised
> -fvia-C path, leaving only native code for normal use and ANSI C for
> porting.  This is because mangled C is only about 3% faster according to
> the GHC benchmark suite, and carries a high maintaince cost.

I still wouldn't want to compile GHC on Windows... For the only GHC
patch I've ever contributed I borrowed a friends Linux box. The build
instructions alone for Windows scarred me off.

Thanks

Neil