Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
| I am aware of some experiments with alternative back-ends for ghc, but I | don't know of any work on a ghc back-end generating portable bytecode. | A few years ago some work was done towards a ghc-hugs fusion, but in the | end hugs remained separate and the ghc people developed ghci. Perhaps | ghc and/or hugs developers can comment further?
GHCi does indeed generate byte code, but we have never gotten around to trying to dump it into files and reload it. That might be an interesting project -- but it only gives a constant performance factor over loading the source files in the first place, so it's not clear that it's a major win.
The major win with having the byte code in a file is that you could have a stand alone byte code interpreter (and runtime system). That would make bootstrapping GHC a much less daunting task. -- Lennart