How about turning ghc into a compilation server ? It would run as a daemon waiting for network connections, retrieve source files (through the same network socket, or nfs, or cvs, ...), compile them locally, and send back the result. This would prevent having to reload the compiler for each file - as the executable is quite large, this may already speed up compilation a bit. It could also cache .hi files, which would remove the need to parse them. It would also enable distributed compilation, on a properly configured site. That would be easy to do with hmake. There are many details to think about (should the parsing be made locally by the driver, or remotely...). How does it sound ?

Funny you should say that. The next version of GHC (5.00 - to be released soon) will have hmake-like functionality enabling it to compile multiple modules without exiting, caching .hi files between compilations. This speeds up compilations by as much as a factor of 2 for large programs. Cheers, Simon