[Haskell] [ANNOUNCE] yhc - York Haskell Compiler

[Neil Mitchell]

Just so that people don't get the wrong idea ...

- Yhc is a working title and it's still not totally decided what it's
relation to nhc98 is. It may be merged back into nhc98, it may replace
nhc98 or it may end up as an entirely seperate project from it.

- It's very much work in progress, indeed the source code in the darcs
repository as of today is currently somewhat disfunctional as is in
between changes (hence why the Makefile is broken).

- It's just an experiment of mine with the backend that turns out to
have sparked some interest. It seems to compile most of Haskell 98 (at
least it did when it last worked ;-)) but it's in no way an industrial
strength compiler yet.

- It's just me and a few other students (who are or were recently at
York) working part time. It's in no way an "official" release.

That said people are free to have a play around and comments,
suggestions or ports are all welcome. I'll try and get the code in
darcs to a reasonable state ASAHP.

Hope that helps settle any confusions :-)

Tom Shackell

On 11/11/05, Thomas Davie <tatd2 at kent.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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)
>
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