ndmitchell:
Hi
1. What is "ghc-core"?
You actually answer this question as part of question 2. Think of it as simple Haskell with some additional bits.
2. Does anybody know how to actually read GHC's Core output anyway? To me, it looks almost exactly like very, very complicated Haskell source with a suspicious concentration of case expressions - but I understand that in the Core language, many constructs actually mean something quite different.
There is one different from standard Haskell I am aware of. In Core, case x of _ -> 1 will evaluate x, in Haskell it won't. Other than that, its just Haskell, but without pattern matching and only cases - hence the rather high number of cases.
Well, 'let's too, which bind either unlifted or lifted values. If they're binding lifted things, that's a thunk being allocated. -- Don