external core

[John Meacham]

Now, the external core feature of ghc is great, but it is not utilized
very much. The main reason I think is that there is a large barrier to
entry in writing something that uses it since you need to parse/generate
it. 

It would be nice if there were a standard library that came with ghc (or
cabalized and portable even better) that could parse and pretty print
external core. 

ideally, one could write a simple pass-through core processor that
interacts with ghc in a single line and someone working on a new
optimization need only worry about that. 

Also, it would make it very easy for jhc to generate and parse ghc core
files (always an ulterior motive). I wanted to use jhcs front end to
generate ghc core so I could get a true measure of the difference in
just their back-end performance without taking into account ghc's
superior high-level optimizations. 

In any case. I think all the code is out there in ghc and it just needs
to be separated and cabalized. I know there was talk of creating a ghc
internals library, but it would be nice if this code were portable and
independent.

        John


-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈