Indeed, GHC can indeed produce (very slow) C. This is known as unregisterised mode [1]. That being said, I'm not sure that helps you with the task at hand. Afterall, you still would need a haskell compiler to build your unregisterised compiler.

[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Unregisterised

On August 22, 2018 12:12:27 PM EDT, Sam Halliday <sam.halliday@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Tom,

I'm not sure it is necessary to go back that far. Vitaly pointed out
that any version of GHC could produce the "minimal C" output, which
can be ported to another platform that doesn't have a GHC, as the
bootstrap. I'm not entirely sure how to generate that output, mind
you.

On 22 August 2018 at 17:05,  <amindfv@gmail.com> wrote:
 (I haven't actually done this, but:) If you want to be able to install GHC without any GHC binary, I think you'd have to start with an ancient version of GHC which wasn't itself written in Haskell, and build successive versions (skipping as many as possible) until you had a GHC which supported all the language features the most-recent version requires.

 If you did embark on this, it would be nice if you could report back with a minimal number of steps it takes to get to current GHC!

 Tom

 El 22 ago 2018, a las 06:01, Sam Halliday <sam.halliday@gmail.com> escribió:

 Hi Ben,

 What is the recommended way to build old versions of GHC? The
 haskell.org binaries for, e.g. 7.8.3, do not work on my machine. If I
 attempt to recompile ghc 7.8.3 with the haskell.org binary, I get
 linkage errors.

 Actually I'd love to be able to bootstrap a build without any ghc
 installed... that would solve the problem. I heard about the "phase0"
 approach from Vitaly Bragilevsky at his Lambdaconf talk this year. But
 I've been unable to find any documentation about it.

 Best regards,
 Sam


 On 22 August 2018 at 12:30, Ben Gamari <ben@smart-cactus.org> wrote:
 In general we don't support bootstrapping older GHCI with newer GHC.
 However, you may be able to hack something together by manually tweaking
 bounds.

 Cheers,

 - Ben

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