HEAD

[Simon Marlow]

> On Mon, 11 Dec 2000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
> > BTW, we'd like to encourage people to start using the HEAD.
> > As a compiler, it is pretty reliable now;
> 
> There are some problems. I'll send more info this evening.
> 
> One thing that prevents it from compiling itself is that 
> foreign export
> dynamic does not generate some functions on the .hc side. All other
> problems were work-aroundable.

Yes, that was one of the things I'll be looking into today.

> > as for GHCi, the current meta-circular interpreter works 
> but is going
> > to be removed in favour of a bytecode based interpreter
> 
> What does it mean "meta-circular" and why is it going to be removed?

meta-circular means that we interpret the code in the language itself,
so the interpreted code, the compiled libraries, and the interpreter are
all running on top of the same RTS.  It's a neat hack, but execution is
slow and there are some difficulties with building constructors and
dealing with unboxed types.  And the whole thing isn't type-safe.

Cheers,
	Simon