I didn't realize asking how long it's been for him, but he mentioned
about new fronts in optimizing compilers and specifically mentioned a
compiler that could compile to legible C. I've been following Haskell 

only for a couple of years, so my intuition tells me that he means
`-fvia-c`, and I mentioned to him that it's about to be deprecated and
replaced with the llvm back-end. I also mentioned hackage, but he hadn't
heard of it.