[Haskell-cafe] Opinion about JHC

[Henning Thielemann]

On Fri, 13 Nov 2009, John Meacham wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 08:55:51PM +0000, Lennart Augustsson wrote:
>> That was indeed my point.  Since a compiler is a substantial program I
>> would have more confidence it a compiler that is self-hosting.
>> Surely you must have tried?
>
> No, there are extensions that I use in jhc's code base that jhc itself
> does not support yet (fundeps for instance).

Maybe you can skip fundeps and move to Type families immediately.

> Although said extensions would be nice and are on the list of things to 
> add to jhc, there are other tasks that are more important. I write a lot 
> of code in Haskell, so getting jhc to compile in jhc isn't much more 
> important than getting any of the other projects I work on to compile in 
> it and I prioritize accordingly. I am all about variety in the tools I 
> use. I never understood the desire to have it be self-hosting, I mean, 
> sure it is a nice abstract goal, but there are things with concrete 
> benefits that are more important to jhc right now. (of course, 
> priorities change over time.)

A JHC compiled JHC might be faster and noticeably smaller? My current jhc 
executable is 15 MB.