External Core

[Josef Svenningsson]

Dear fellow GHC users,

For a number of years GHC has been equipped with the external core language.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this, it is a way to get GHC to
emit or read in programs in a format which is very close to its internal
intermediate language. This is for instance useful when you want to play
with various optimisations. Currently external core is close to an orphan.
Nobody is actively maintaining it and it is low on the GHC team's priority
list.

However, here at Chalmers we have two projects running which depends
critically on external core. We have therefore volunteered to adopt external
core and take responsibility for it. I will be the organiser of this effort.
We are happy for the blessing from the GHC developers and for trusting us
with this. 

We have a number of ideas on how we would like external core. But before
putting up an agenda we would like to hear from all the people out there who
uses external core. We would be very happy to hear who you are, what you are
doing with external core and what changes you might want to see. I'm hoping
that we together can work out an external core format which is useful for
many people.

Hoping to hear from you,

	/Josef Svenningsson, PhD student at Chalmers, External core tsar