On Tue, 2005-12-20 at 16:58 -0800, John Meacham wrote:
On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 10:36:36AM -0600, Creighton Hogg wrote:
I was wondering where I should get started in learing about how to implement a haskell compiler?
Warning: a whole Haskell compiler is a LOT of work. Nonetheless there are examples of mostly-single-person compilers and interpreters out there, so it is possible to do one on your own. Though I don't think reading their source code is necessarily the best way to get started. I agree with what John said, especially this:
there are various other abstract machines out there, the Lazy Virtual Machine used by Helium described in Daan Leijen's Phd thesis is quite interesting, and might make a better first target than G-machine code.
If you want to write a compiler, targeting LVM is (I believe) the easiest way to get something working. You could get the source code for hatchet from him to give you a front end. Another approach is to write a simple interpreter for a small functional language and add features in bit-by-bit, as your enthusiasm dictates. That way, you get the satisfaction of having something work early on. If you write a compiler it might take weeks or months before it does anything interesting. Then you can custom build your language with whatever features take your fancy. For instance you can add a better record system, or play with meta-programming facilities. I started a little project like this a while ago, called baskell, which you can get from here: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~bjpop/code.html It has a rudimentary type checker, and a little REPL interface. Feel free to hack it to pieces. Cheers, Bernie.