[Haskell] [ANNOUNCE] yhc - York Haskell Compiler

[Colin Runciman]

Bulat,

>CR> * Part of Tom's motivation for the new back-end is a nice implementation
>CR> of his Hat G-machine for tracing.
>
>i'm interested whether this sort of things is possible as back-end for
>GHC?
>
>it will be great if current front-end for GHC which supports number of
>widely used extensions can be used together with new sorts of
>back-ends, including debugging and super-optimizing (like jhc) ones
>  
>
I am aware of some experiments with alternative back-ends for ghc, but I 
don't know of any work on a ghc back-end generating portable bytecode.  
A few years ago some work was done towards a ghc-hugs fusion, but in the 
end hugs remained separate and the ghc people developed ghci.  Perhaps 
ghc and/or hugs developers can comment further?

So far as debugging back-ends for ghc are concerned, Robert Ennals and 
Simon PJ did a stop-and-look style debugger using speculative evaluation 
which perhaps is still distributed? For systems that record a complete  
computational trace, a modified abstract machine is an attractively 
efficient alternative to source-to-source transformation, but inevitably 
demands more cooperation from the front-end to provide the extra 
information needed.

Colin R