It's interesting that the article completely fails to mention hbc which I know they used during the GHC bootstrap. Oh well. :)
On Nov 11, 2007 2:41 PM, Richard Kelsall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Andrew Coppin wrote: > > "...if GHC is written in Haskell, how the heck did they compile GHC in > > the first place?" > > The paper "A History of Haskell: Being Lazy With Class" by Paul Hudak, > John Hughes, Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler is a good read. > > http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/history-of-haskell/index.htm > > A snippet > > "GHC was begun in January 1989 at the University of Glasgow, as soon > as the initial language design was fixed. The first version of GHC was > written in LML by Kevin Hammond, and was essentially a new front end to > the Chalmers LML compiler. This prototype started to work in June 1989, > just as Peyton Jones arrived in Glasgow to join the burgeoning > functional programming group there. The prototype compiler implemented > essentially all of Haskell 1.0 including views (later removed), type > classes, the deriving mechanism, the fullmodule system, and binary I/O > as well as both streams and continuations. It was reasonably robust > (with occasional spectacular failures), but the larger Haskell prelude > stressed the LML prelude mechanism quite badly, and the added complexity > of type classes meant the compiler was quite a lot bigger and slower > than the base LML compiler. > ... > GHC proper was begun in the autumn of 1989, by a team consisting > initially of Cordelia Hall, Will Partain, and Peyton Jones. It was > designed from the ground up as a complete implementation of Haskell in > Haskell, bootstrapped via the prototype compiler. The only part that was > shared with the prototype was the parser, which at that stage was still > written in Yacc and C. The first beta release was on 1 April 1991 (the > date was no accident), but it was another 18 months before the first > full release (version 0.10) was made in December 1992." > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe