I would start simple by creating a Lisp compiler or low level interpreter, and am personally a great fan of https://github.com/openube/zozotez, but making a compiler for Haskell is of course way more difficult, productive and awesome. Gil came with some good links to help you with that.

@Jonne Maybe I should have been a little more precise. I'm specifically interested in a compilation step, that is turning a AST of some functional language say untyped lambda calculus into a sequence of imperative instructions. And I'm looking for a somewhat structured materials on the subject. If I were to give an analogy it would be how you would teach someone about sorting algorithms. You would start with simple solutions that most people come up on their own, like insert or bubble sort. Then you go on about explaining problems with complexity of that solutions and you present slightly more complex but optimal algorithms like quick or merge sort. Then maybe you would give a proof that n log n is best you can do for comparison based solutions. Then you could ask what could be done if you remove that restriction, and so on... That way I could get a more complete understanding of the field. Where all I was able to fish from google were papers about (to continue the analogy) theoretical complexity of a sorting algorithm on a quantum computer or constant time improvements of a heap sort given architecture with SIMD instruction set. And of course given enough time I would be able to piece all that knowledge together, but I'm hoping someone could spare me that time. @Gil Thanks for suggestions, I was able to locate previously these series by Stephan Diehl and they are truly quality material, the only problem is that the first one deals with compiling an imperative language. So it is of great use as practical solution to llvm generation but doesn't really answers any of my theoretical questions about functional language compilation. The second one on the other hand deals with haskell so that's a bit of a jump already but also is still a work in progress and crucially doesn't yet have the chapters regarding compilation. As for others most of them are new to me so I guess I'll have to take a deeper look. Ultimately I wasn't really expecting to get all that knowledge on a silver platter. I guess I'll have to dig into all that literature until I'll come out enlightened, so really anything useful you can throw at me I'll be grateful for. Thanks, Max.

@Matthew: Gil already provided a link for that, which appears to be the first result on Google aswell: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/pj-lester-book/ @Max: Haskell compilation is not really my area, but if a Lisp compiler seems too easy (And I have to say, it _is_ quite easy, and shouldn't take more than a couple of hours of coding), I would recommend starting by looking into the Haskell Core to find out what Haskell boils down to. From there you might be able to figure out how Haskell actually gets turned into iterative code. The links Gil provided really help with this aswell. This stackoverflow page contains some useful links and a compact explaination of the Haskell Core, and is a great introduction to the Haskell core. (Although it might be focused more around optimalization than it is about the core itself): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6121146/reading-ghc-core Explaination from haskell.org: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Compiler/CoreSynType PDF (As found on the above page): https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/6.12.2/docs/core.pdf Sorry if these links are not helping. I am still trying to figure out the Haskell Core myself. On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 2:28 PM, Matthew Pickering < matthewtpickering@gmail.com> wrote:

Try to find "Implementing Functional Languages: A Tutorial" by Simon Peyton-Jones and David Lester.

On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 12:42 PM, Maksymilian Owsianny wrote:

...

@Jonne

Maybe I should have been a little more precise. I'm specifically interested in a compilation step, that is turning a AST of some functional language say untyped lambda calculus into a sequence of imperative instructions.

And I'm looking for a somewhat structured materials on the subject.

If I were to give an analogy it would be how you would teach someone about sorting algorithms. You would start with simple solutions that most people come up on their own, like insert or bubble sort. Then you go on about explaining problems with complexity of that solutions and you present slightly more complex but optimal algorithms like quick or merge sort. Then maybe you would give a proof that n log n is best you can do for comparison based solutions. Then you could ask what could be done if you remove that restriction, and so on...

That way I could get a more complete understanding of the field.

Where all I was able to fish from google were papers about (to continue the analogy) theoretical complexity of a sorting algorithm on a quantum computer or constant time improvements of a heap sort given architecture with SIMD instruction set.

And of course given enough time I would be able to piece all that knowledge together, but I'm hoping someone could spare me that time.

@Gil

Thanks for suggestions, I was able to locate previously these series by Stephan Diehl and they are truly quality material, the only problem is that the first one deals with compiling an imperative language. So it is of great use as practical solution to llvm generation but doesn't really answers any of my theoretical questions about functional language compilation. The second one on the other hand deals with haskell so that's a bit of a jump already but also is still a work in progress and crucially doesn't yet have the chapters regarding compilation. As for others most of them are new to me so I guess I'll have to take a deeper look.

Ultimately I wasn't really expecting to get all that knowledge on a silver platter. I guess I'll have to dig into all that literature until I'll come out enlightened, so really anything useful you can throw at me I'll be grateful for.

Thanks, Max.

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There is part II of this set of slides by Xavier Leroy: http://gallium.inria.fr/~xleroy/mpri/2-4/. Paul On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 10:27 PM Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

On 11/03/16 3:17 am, Jonne Ransijn wrote:

...

if a Lisp compiler seems too easy (And I have to say, it _is_ quite easy, and shouldn't take more than a couple of hours of coding),

Since you know so much about writing Lisp compilers, perhaps you can point me to something that explains how to implement Common Lisp function calls efficiently? There are &optional, &rest, and &key parameters to deal with, and when the compiler sees a call site, in general it hasn't a clue what the target is expecting (this is unlike optional and keyword parameters in Swift, for example). If it were just required, &optional, and &rest parameters, I could see how to do it, but throwing &key in makes it much harder.

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Max, I had similar questions several years ago and was able to do a term project to answer them. I wrote a really simple compiler for a Haskell-like language called "habit". The code doesn't work anymore, but you can read my report here: https://github.com/m4dc4p/mil/blob/master/caffeine/report/report.pdf It covers translating an AST into x86, closure representation, among other topics. Under that directory you'll also find the source code to the compiler and a presentation I gave on it. On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 4:42 AM, Maksymilian Owsianny wrote:

@Jonne

Maybe I should have been a little more precise. I'm specifically interested in a compilation step, that is turning a AST of some functional language say untyped lambda calculus into a sequence of imperative instructions.

And I'm looking for a somewhat structured materials on the subject.

If I were to give an analogy it would be how you would teach someone about sorting algorithms. You would start with simple solutions that most people come up on their own, like insert or bubble sort. Then you go on about explaining problems with complexity of that solutions and you present slightly more complex but optimal algorithms like quick or merge sort. Then maybe you would give a proof that n log n is best you can do for comparison based solutions. Then you could ask what could be done if you remove that restriction, and so on...

That way I could get a more complete understanding of the field.

Where all I was able to fish from google were papers about (to continue the analogy) theoretical complexity of a sorting algorithm on a quantum computer or constant time improvements of a heap sort given architecture with SIMD instruction set.

And of course given enough time I would be able to piece all that knowledge together, but I'm hoping someone could spare me that time.

@Gil

Thanks for suggestions, I was able to locate previously these series by Stephan Diehl and they are truly quality material, the only problem is that the first one deals with compiling an imperative language. So it is of great use as practical solution to llvm generation but doesn't really answers any of my theoretical questions about functional language compilation. The second one on the other hand deals with haskell so that's a bit of a jump already but also is still a work in progress and crucially doesn't yet have the chapters regarding compilation. As for others most of them are new to me so I guess I'll have to take a deeper look.

Ultimately I wasn't really expecting to get all that knowledge on a silver platter. I guess I'll have to dig into all that literature until I'll come out enlightened, so really anything useful you can throw at me I'll be grateful for.

Thanks, Max.

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