The bootstrappable builds project tries to find ways of building all our software from source, without relying on binary artifacts. A noble goal, and one that is often thwarted by languages with self-hosting compilers, like GHC: In order to build GHC, you need GHC. A Pull Request against nixpkgs , adding first steps of the bootstrapping pipeline, reminded me of the issue with GHC, which I have noted down some thoughts about before and I played around a bit more.
The most promising attempt to bootstrap GHC was done by rekado in 2017 . He observed that Hugs is maybe the most recently maintained bootstrappable (since written in C) Haskell compiler, but noticed that “it cannot deal with mutually recursive module dependencies, which is a feature that even the earliest versions of GHC rely on. This means that running a variant of GHC inside of Hugs is not going to work without major changes.” He then tries to bootstrap another very old Haskell compiler (nhc) with Hugs, a
This made me wonder: What if Hugs supported mutually recursive modules? Would that make a big difference? Anthony Clayden keeps advocating Hugs as a viable Haskell implementation , so maybe if that was the main blocker, then adding support to Hugs for that is probably not too hard (at least in a compile-the-strongly-connected-component-as-one-unit mode) and worthwhile?
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About this book - Learn Haskell by building a blog generator
About this book - Learn Haskell by building a blog generator
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