[Haskell] GHC Core & backend

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

I don't see why it should be hard to use GHC's back end in this way.
GHC's core language is pretty stable.  I don't find the external
representation of Core very appealing, but it's really meant for
computers not people.

An important constraint is that Core is *typed*, so you'd need a front
end that kept type information around.

Best thing would be to try a small experiment, to climb the learning
curve a bit.  Compile some little programs with GHC and see what Core
they produce.  Try generating a little Core.  And so on.

Kirsten Chevalier has quite a bit of experience of producing External
Core using GHC, transforming it externally, and stuffing it back into
GHC.

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: haskell-bounces at haskell.org [mailto:haskell-bounces at haskell.org]
On Behalf Of Arjan van
| IJzendoorn
| Sent: 13 February 2004 12:43
| To: haskell at haskell.org
| Subject: [Haskell] GHC Core & backend
| 
| Hello all,
| 
| Is anybody using GHC's backend as a backend for their own compiler?
| 
| In the paper "An external representation for the GHC Core Language"
the
| introduction states that "there are many (undocumented) idiosyncracies
in
| the way GHC produces Core from source Haskell". And that "it will be
hard to
| produced Core that can be integrated with GHC-produced core, and we
don't
| aim to support this". Has this changed since the time of writing this
paper?
| 
| It would be cool if, let's say, Helium (http://www.cs.uu.nl/helium)
could
| use all of GHC's libraries...
| 
| Regards, Arjan van IJzendoorn
| 
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