[Haskell-cafe] Announce: glome-hs-0.51 (Haskell raytracer, now with type classes)

[Don Stewart]

> I've started looking more seriously into optimization (suggestions 
> welcome).  Don Stewart's blog post 
> (http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/blog/2008/05/16#fast) was quite 
> useful, but it seems like there's a lot of arcane knowledge required to 
> understand what's really happening in "core" code.  Is there any better 
> reference than Andrew Tolmach's paper "An External Representation for 
> the GHC Core Language (2001)" 
> http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/tolmach01external.html?

As SPJ says, it is just a simple functional language (with
unlifted and lifted types). The problem is probably more the syntax,
than Core itself.

There's a new paper about the core type system,

    http://research.microsoft.com/%7Esimonpj/papers/ext%2Df/

Otherwise, Andrew's paper is still a reasonable reference. I'd install
ghc-core too, which cleans up the output somewhat, and helps with syntax
highlighting.

-- Don