External Core in binary format

[Simon Marlow]

Neil Mitchell wrote:

>> So presumably you'd be happy if you could do something like this:
>>
>> import qualified GHC
>>
>> getYHCCore :: FilePath -> YHC.Core
>> getYHCCore file = do
>>      s <- GHC.newSession
>>      ghc_core <- GHC.compileToCore s "Foo.hs"
>>      convertToYHCCore ghc_core
>>
>> ie. without any on-disk representation at all, just using the GHC 
>> API.  We don't
>> currently have GHC.compileToCore, but it would be just a matter of 
>> doing the
>> plumbing.
> 
> Yes, that would suit my needs perfectly. The only one niggle might be
> that for some applications I'll need to have compiled all the
> libraries into Core as well, so the compileToCore function would
> require things like "Prelude.hs" to work as well.

Well, in GHC the Prelude ~= the base package, so you'll have to translate (a 
large chunk of) base into YHC.Core.  It uses lots of primitives, so you'll need 
translations for many of those (exceptions?  MVars?  GMP operations?).  You'll 
need to be able to do foreign calls, too.  This all sounds pretty ambitious.

Cheers,
	Simon