Hacking GHC—What I’ve learned

Posted on Saturday, 18 April 2009 at 09:47.

Here’s what I have learned about GHC after spending a full day hacking into it:

When developing on GHC you need the version from darcs, which takes a very long time to download. Fortunately I was able to get a checkout from another hacker.
Don’t forget to tell the Makefile that you’d like to use the quickest version of the build: in mk/, do a cp build.mk.sample build.mk and uncomment the appropriate line.
You only need to build stage=2 once—after that, cd compiler and make stage=2 whenever you update the compiler.
The GHC API index is very useful when finding your way through the code.
The GHC Commentary contains many useful articles on GHC’s internals.

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