Dear list, I'm reposting my message from Haskell-cafe here since this seems like a more appropriate place to ask this question. I would like to learn about internals of GHC and contribute to its development in the future. I read a couple of papers that give a very general overview of GHC (chapter from AoS, papers about inliner and multicore support) and I'm thinking what direction should I pursue now. I got the GHC sources and started reading commentary on the wiki, but it seems that entry barrier is very high. Aside from the problem of understanding the whole project organization itself, I also don't have background on implementation of functional languages. In fact I have a rather basic knowledge of compilers in general - I only took Stanford's online course on Compilers at Coursera. I was thinking that perhaps I should read SPJs "Implementing Functional Languages: a tutorial" or "The Implementation Of Functional Languages" book to learn more about theory? On the other hand I don't know if getting stuck in theory for next couple of months is a good idea. I would greatly appreciate any advice and help. Janek