[Haskell-cafe] How to start with GHC development?

[Janek S.]

Dear list,

I would like to learn about internals of GHC and contribute to its development in the future. I 
read a couple of papers that give a very general overview of GHC (chapter from AoS, papers about 
inliner and multicore support) and I'm thinking what direction should I pursue now. I was 
thinking about:

a) getting GHC sources, reading the commentary on the GHC wiki and hacking the code
b) reading SPJs "Implementing Functional Languages: a tutorial"
c) reading SPJs "The Implementation Of Functional Languages" book

I would definitely go for a), but I don't know if I'll manage to understand the code without 
knowing how functional languages are compiled. I have a rather basic knowledge of compilers in 
general - I took Stanford's online course on Compilers at Coursera. Should I get more theoretical 
knowledge? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Janek