[Haskell-cafe] Somewhat random history question - chicken and egg

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> > "...if GHC is written in Haskell, how the heck did they compile GHC in
> > the first place?"

GHC was not the first Haskell compiler, hbc was the main compiler at
some point, so I suspect they used hbc. There was also lazy ML which I
suspect was used to bootstrap hbc - but I'm not sure of the details.

> ... and what happens, if they add a new feature, use it in the compiler
> itself, and then it turns out, that the implementation of the new feature
> was buggy?

GHC can be compiled with GHC 5.0 (or something around there). If they
add a new feature, they don't use it in GHC for years and years.

Thanks

Neil