Friends, As someone who started hacking on GHC last month I wanted to tell you that there is to high an overhead to getting started and overall to contributing to GHC. One thing that can help is to make getting to the point of compiling GHC a much faster experience rather than starting off by dreading the process of installing dependencies. I created a docker image that has everything needed pre-installed. I do know that there are existing docker images for running the GHC compiler, but I am not aware of any designed for hacking on it. Please give it a try and let me know if it works for you. The beauty is that once you have GHC checked out, if you have docker installed you are a single command away from having a working GHC environment: docker run --rm -i -t -v `pwd`:/home/ghc gregweber/ghc-haskell-dev /bin/bash Once getting some feedback, I would like to document this on the wiki and recommend it for Linux users (definitely for anyone that is familiar with docker). Thank you, Greg Weber