[Haskell] GHC Core & backend

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

afie:
> Hello all,
> 
> Is anybody using GHC's backend as a backend for their own compiler?

I know of one project at least, in development and undocumented, that
uses GHC's backend. However, it doesn't use the Core interface. Rather,
it uses an interface Mark Wotton and I wrote to the Stix layer of the
native code generator. This is around 3 abstraction layers further down
the compiler.

> In the paper "An external representation for the GHC Core Language" the
> introduction states that "there are many (undocumented) idiosyncracies in
> the way GHC produces Core from source Haskell". And that "it will be hard to
> produced Core that can be integrated with GHC-produced core, and we don't
> aim to support this". Has this changed since the time of writing this paper?

I'm pretty sure this hasn't changed. It is hard but not impossible. Lots
of magic though.

> It would be cool if, let's say, Helium (http://www.cs.uu.nl/helium) could
> use all of GHC's libraries...

-- Don