Re: [Haskell-cafe] Code generation and optimisation for compiling Haskell

On 1/12/12 8:50 PM, Jason Dagit wrote:

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 9:25 AM, Steve Horne wrote:

...

Also, what papers should I read? Am I on the right lines with the ones I've mentioned above?

Thomas Schilling gave you a good response with papers so I will give you a different perspective on where to look.

Most of the Haskell implementations were written by academics studying languages and compilers. This is good but it also implies that the implementors are likely to share biases and assumptions. I know of one Haskell compiler in particular that was written by someone who did not know Haskell when starting the project. The compiler was developed to be different than GHC. That person was John Meacham. He created JHC, a work in progress, so you might want to study his compiler and implementation notes as they should provide a different perspective on how to tackle Haskell implementation and optimization.

http://repetae.net/computer/jhc/

JHC is also notable as a point of contrast because GHC strives to have a uniform representation in order to simplify adding high-level optimizations, whereas JHC is especially focused on the low-level optimizations obtainable by using non-uniform representations. More and more of these representational issues have been creeping into GHC over the years, so you should definitely take a look at JHC to get a different perspective on the space of possibilities than just those illuminated by the trajectory of GHC. On the other end of things, if your heart lies in the compiler itself rather than the generated code per se, you should definitely take a look at UHC. We often talk about "Haskell" as if it were a language, when in fact it is a family of related languages with subtly different features and properties. One of the principal goals of EHC/UHC is to design a compiler as a series of small passes in order to better disentangle the issues surrounding trying to compile an entire family of languages. They also have some novel code for dealing with the parsing end of the compiler, which is worth exploring separately from the overall design. -- Live well, ~wren