Hi
btw, you doesn't need to use unix in order to play with ghc HEAD - you can download compiled windows binary Seriously? I'm pretty sure I tried to do that and couldn't...
Seriously. Thanks to Igloo, you can even download a GHC nightly complete with an installer! It doesn't get any easier than that :) http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/current/dist/ghc-6.7.20070706-i386-unknown-m...
I did think about compiling GHC myself once. But then I found out that it's not actually written in Haskell - it's written in Haskell + C + asm + Perl (?!) and it's utterly *huge*...
Perl may die soon - GHC HQ is considering retiring the registerised -fvia-C path, leaving only native code for normal use and ANSI C for porting. This is because mangled C is only about 3% faster according to the GHC benchmark suite, and carries a high maintaince cost.
I still wouldn't want to compile GHC on Windows... For the only GHC patch I've ever contributed I borrowed a friends Linux box. The build instructions alone for Windows scarred me off. Thanks Neil