afie:
Hello all,
Is anybody using GHC's backend as a backend for their own compiler?
I know of one project at least, in development and undocumented, that uses GHC's backend. However, it doesn't use the Core interface. Rather, it uses an interface Mark Wotton and I wrote to the Stix layer of the native code generator. This is around 3 abstraction layers further down the compiler.
In the paper "An external representation for the GHC Core Language" the introduction states that "there are many (undocumented) idiosyncracies in the way GHC produces Core from source Haskell". And that "it will be hard to produced Core that can be integrated with GHC-produced core, and we don't aim to support this". Has this changed since the time of writing this paper?
I'm pretty sure this hasn't changed. It is hard but not impossible. Lots of magic though.
It would be cool if, let's say, Helium (http://www.cs.uu.nl/helium) could use all of GHC's libraries...
-- Don