Just a quick comment on a couple of things Brian Strand writes: > Or is ghc/Haskell established enough that > the existence of some Haskell compiler is taken for granted nowadays?
Ghc is not written in pure Haskell - it is written in Ghc Haskell, i.e. it uses many extensions and internal libraries not available in all other Haskell implementations. Thus, you really need ghc to bootstrap ghc. > Would it be unreasonable to include the unregisterised .hc files with > a source distribution (or .hc files for "popular" platforms), so that > a Haskell novice such as myself could do a "./configure && make && > make install"? If configure detected no ghc, perhaps it could do the > bootstrap automagically. This is what nhc98 does - supplies platform independent .hc files for bootstrapping via gcc if no existing Haskell compiler is installed. However, nhc98 uses a bytecode VM, so it produces code that is 3x - 15x slower than ghc, (currently) lacks many of the lower-level libraries, and implements very few language extensions. Thus it has a smaller user base, and smaller maintainer base too (therefore not much ongoing development). Ideally, if ghc were implemented in something closer to Haskell'98, it would be possible to double-bootstrap up from gcc -> nhc98 -> ghc unregisterised -> ghc registerised, on almost any new platform. But the amount of work required to 98-ify ghc is considerable (there are 148 kLoC to check), and it is hard to say whether it would be worthwhile. Maybe someone fancies tackling it as a medium-size project? Regards, Malcolm _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users