The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) Commentary [v0.4]

Manuel M. T. Chakravarty
Simon Marlow
Simon Peyton Jones
Reuben Thomas
 

This document started as a collection of notes describing what I learnt when poking around in the GHC sources. During the Haskell Implementers Workshop in January 2001 it was decided to put the commentary into GHC's CVS repository to allow the whole developer community to add their wizardly insight to the document.

The document is still in its infancy - help it grow!

Before the Show Begins

• Feedback
• Other Sources of Wisdom

Genesis

• Outline of the Genesis
• Mindboggling Makefiles

The Beast Dissected

• The Glorious Driver
• The Basics
• The Real Story about Variables, Ids, TyVars, and the like
• Checking Types
• The Mighty Simplifier
• The Evil Mangler
• Alien Functions

RTS & Libraries

• Spineless Tagless C
• Primitives
• Prelude Foundations
• Cunning Prelude Code
• Array Libraries [not available yet]
• On why we have ForeignPtr

The online master copy of the Commentary is at

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ghc/comm/

This online version is updated from CVS daily.

Last modified: Tue Nov 13 10:32:11 EST 2001