On 13 Aug 2016, at 5:58 AM, MarLinn via Haskell-Cafe <haskell-cafe@haskell.org> wrote:

So maybe you can help me here: Have you experienced any of the alternative compilers as especially easy for a newcomer to pick up and play around with? If it helps, I would be satisfied with plain Haskell2010 or even Haskell 98, although some GADT and/or TypeFamilies code to butcher would be nice, too. The ideas are mostly about larger scale structures like whole functions.

You might want to check out DDC [1]. It’s still in a pre-alpha state, but what it does have is a working external core language. You could write your own front end that produces System-F, then have DDC compile that. The individual compiler passes are also fairly well separated, so it’s easy to change.

One representative example idea is "Could it help the implementation - and does it even make sense - to view a module as just a weirdly written zero parameter type class?" As I said: crazy ideas.