Hi there,

I'm trying to run GHC in a mips-SGI-irix platform, more accurately Irix 6.

The last binary version avalaible (ftp://ftp.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/pub/haskell/glasgow/) is for ghc-2.10 (ghc-2.10-mips-sgi-irix6.tar.gz) .

In order to reach the actual ghc-5-XX step by step, I will start by porting ghc-3.02, ghc-4.08....

This is one way, but as you noticed you need to be careful about gcc versions. There are 4 porting steps involved: 2.10 (should just work given the right gcc version), 3.02, 4.08, and finally 5.02. Each step will require a particular gcc and perhaps changes to the mangler. This is a long and tortuous route to getting GHC working. There is a better way, as suggested by Keith, namely to bootstrap from .hc files. The best version to start from is 4.08(.2) (later versions have problems with .hc bootstrapping). One can bootstrap the compiler using "unregisterised" .hc files, which avoids the mangler. The process has been discussed on one of the lists before, but I just did a search and couldn't find it - maybe you'll have better luck. Anyhow there are three stages: first you generate the unregisterised .hc files using a two-stage bootstrap on a machine with a working 4.08 GHC (eg. a Linux box). Then you compile these on the target machine to generate a working unregisterised compiler. Finally you can use this compiler to experiment with getting registerised builds working - i.e. modifying the mangler. Cheers, Simon