On 24 February 2005 11:12, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

Ideally, if ghc were implemented in something closer to Haskell'98, it would be possible to double-bootstrap up from gcc -> nhc98 -> ghc unregisterised -> ghc registerised, on almost any new platform. But the amount of work required to 98-ify ghc is considerable (there are 148 kLoC to check), and it is hard to say whether it would be worthwhile. Maybe someone fancies tackling it as a medium-size project?

It's feasible, but unfortunately probably not practical. Not only would someone have to do the work, we'd have to maintain the Haskell 98 version too. That's yet another way to build GHC, and there are already too many variables for us to test them all. However, a more reasonable approach might be to remove the platform dependencies from GHC and the libraries it requires for bootstrapping. That is, make it so that unregisterised .hc files are platform-independent. I think we used to have this property in the distant past, but it got lost somewhere along the way. It would mean banishing platform differences into C code wherever necessary, which would result in more C code and less Haskell code, but it might be worthwhile. Cheers, Simon