Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
| Ah well, I doubt I'm going to come up with any new ideas for how to make | my code go faster, but it's mildly entertaining wading through over 200 | KB of textual output trying to guess what it means.
Ha ha. You did say that you wanted to know what GHC *really* does :-)
I know. I'm not "really" complaining. ;-)
Seriously, there is mileage in someone working on the core-language pretty-printer to make it less intimidating. It was never really designed for wide consumption, and could be a lot better. Suppressing more qualified names, for example.
I wonder... is there a high-level document anywhere which explains what GHC actually does with your code when you compile it? I mean, presumably the first thing it does is check whether the source is parsable, syntactically correct, type checks, etc. As I understand it, it then translates the program into Core, does some Core-to-Core transformations (I have no idea what transformations), and finally feeds that into a code generator - either assembly or C. That's about all I know. I mean, I'm *presuming* that the final compiled form is some kind of graph-reduction machine... but I don't really know. (On the other hand, presumably the GHC developers spend more time, like, *developing* GHC rather than writing about how it works...)