Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
On 2008 Sep 1, at 14:47, Andrew Coppin wrote:
I wonder - how do the GHC developers check that GHC works properly? (I guess by compiling stuff and running it... It's a bit harder to check that a lambda interpretter is working right.)
GHC has a comprehensive test suite (not included in the source tarball or the default checkout but easily checked out atop GHC).
I'm sure a large, complex product like GHC would have a large test suite. I was asking how it works. ;-) Since GHC actually transforms Haskell to machine code in several stages, I presume each one can be checked independently, which probably makes things easier. But I bet the GHC developers don't have any way to just automatically build 1,000 random test cases and check that the compiler "works" for those...