[Haskell-cafe] Somewhat random history question

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| It's interesting that the article completely fails to mention hbc
| which I know they used during the GHC bootstrap.  Oh well. :)
|
| On Nov 11, 2007 2:41 PM, Richard Kelsall <r.kelsall at millstream.com> wrote:
| > Andrew Coppin wrote:
| > > "...if GHC is written in Haskell, how the heck did they compile GHC in
| > > the first place?"

Lennart, I'm sure this is my fault, and I do apologise.  If we used hbc in the bootstrap, I'd completely forgotten; I thought we'd just used the LML compiler, which is indeed credited.  (Perhaps not everyone knows that you wrote the LML compiler too, with Thomas Johnsson, of course.   It completely changed the landscape of lazy-functional-language compilers.)  What I do remember is that we constantly compared ghc's performance to hbc's, and took ages to catch up!

I wish we'd corrected any errors of fact before the paper was published.  (It was on the Web for 6 months before publication to accumulate corrections, but errors and omissions remain our fault.)

Simon