[Haskell] [ANNOUNCE] yhc - York Haskell Compiler

[Thomas Davie]

Announcing the York Haskell Compiler - a Haskell 98 compiler with
roots in nhc98. It's not totally finished, but is getting there
quickly, and could well be of interest to Haskell developers.

Webpage: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~ndm/yhc/
Project Blog: http://yhc06.blogspot.com/
Project Wiki: http://haskell.org/hawiki/Yhc
Darcs: darcs get http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/darcs/yhc

As many of you now know, the York Haskell Compiler project is now
getting well and truely off the ground.  For those of you that don't
know, I'll give you a quick summary.

Over the last few months Tom Shackell has rewritten the back end of
nhc98, to create the yhc compiler.  The new compiler is extremely
lightweight, runs fast, and generates code that runs at a speed
roughly midway between hugs and ghc.  Better than that though, the
compiler generates bytecode to be run on a virtual machine, and thus
can create portable binaries!  The virtual machine is written in C and
thus can bootstrap the whole compiler system on just about any
platform (it's already known to work on linux, windows and OS X).

Several problems that nhc had have been addressed in the rewrite
including the hi-mem bug, and making it work on Windows (without
cygwin). There is still a lot of work to do though - contributions
welcome!

Thanks

Tom Davie (and the rest of the yhc team)