Inspecting reduced/optimized code

[Keith Wansbrough]

> 
> Is it possible/easy in any of the compilers/interpreters to see what the
> results of rewriting/optimisations are?  (I'm sure it is *possible*, I'm
> really asking if any produce simple output in a well documented format
> that I'm likely to understand).

Very easy in GHC.  GHC does its optimisations on code in a functional
language called "Core", which is a cut-down version of Haskell with
explicit typing.  It's quite readable (apart from the weird
automatically-chosen variable names), and you can get it to dump it at
various stages.  Take a look at

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/options-debugging.html

for info.  You might find the following link useful for understanding
what the various passes are:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ghc/comm/

HTH.

--KW 8-)