11 Nov
2007
11 Nov
'07
10:49 a.m.
On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 11:07:29AM +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi
"...if GHC is written in Haskell, how the heck did they compile GHC in the first place?"
GHC was not the first Haskell compiler, hbc was the main compiler at some point, so I suspect they used hbc. There was also lazy ML which I suspect was used to bootstrap hbc - but I'm not sure of the details.
Hbc didn't need to be bootstrapped because it isn't written in Haskell - it's written in Lazy ML. Lazy ML would need to be bootstrapped, but since it has (almost?) the same syntax as Standard ML, I suspect the first versions of lml were written in SML. (Can you clarify, L. Augustsson?) Stefan