Good afternoon, at http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/as49/c2hsPatched.tgz you find a patched version 0.13.1 of c2hs that supports precompiled headers. While parsing and name analysis takes as much time as it did before, writing and reading pre-compiled header information is quick. Hence converting several files that are based on the same header file is much quicker because the header is precompiled once and the precompiled header is used several times for each .chs module. AFAIK Manuel's main concern was that it doesn't fit with generating code and conditionals in his newer versions of c2hs since these .chs modules would output a bit of C which has to be translated together with the header file. I took a pragmatic approach to solve this. Suppose you have the header file calls.h and the binding file Calls.chs. The normal way of translating is c2hs call.h Calls.chs or with the newer verions being able to peek into the .chs file to figure out what header file to use you can simply say c2hs Calls.chs Most binding modules (at least those modules I am interested in) do not have conditionals or produce C declarations. For those you can now say c2hs --precomp=calls.h.precomp calls.h giving you a precompiled verison of calls.h. As a second step you say c2hs --precomp=calls.h.precomp Calls.chs which translates Calls.chs using the precompiled header file calls.h.precomp. You may also say c2hs --precomp=calls.h.precomp calls.h Calls.chs which generates the precompiled header and expands the module Calls.chs using the precompiled header. In case Calls.chs contains any C declarations that need to be parsed, the whole header file is parsed as normal (like in the first example) and the precompiled header information is written, but not used. There are a couple of things that need to be addressed: - the precompiled header files are quite large (about 20Mb for Gtk 2) which is mostly due to the file names in identifiers, which are written out for every identifier. Ideally a new string table should be added to the global monad and the String in the file name attribute should be replaced by a UName, which is an index into a string table. The string table of file names can then be written separately and every file name only appears once. I don't understand enough about the structure and the monads in c2hs to estimate how difficult this change is, so I'd rather leave this up to Manuel. - I applied my ForeignPtr patch we use for gtk2hs to correct argument passing of ForeignPtrs which have to be unwrapped and passed as Ptrs. This fix is still broken for newtypes of Ptrs and types without a newtype wrapper. The fix should not be too hard. - I hope the improvement that Duncan found in the token conversion is not yet applied to Manuel's version 0.13.1 since the mentioned version is incredebly slow. This has nothing to do with the precompilation stuff, it was that slow before. - To read files lazily I used memory-mapped read-only files (which are like a big constant). They work great but are not very portable. I put the non-portable bits in SysDepGHC6.hs but haven't bothered to write this code for other compilers and versions. Let me know what you think, Axel.