Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
| Ah well, I doubt I'm going to come up with any new ideas for how to make
| my code go faster, but it's mildly entertaining wading through over 200
| KB of textual output trying to guess what it means.
Ha ha. You did say that you wanted to know what GHC *really* does :-)
I know. I'm not "really" complaining. ;-)
Seriously, there is mileage in someone working on the core-language
pretty-printer to make it less intimidating. It was never really designed for
wide consumption, and could be a lot better. Suppressing more qualified names,
for example.
I wonder... is there a high-level document anywhere which explains what
GHC actually does with your code when you compile it? I mean, presumably
the first thing it does is check whether the source is parsable,
syntactically correct, type checks, etc. As I understand it, it then
translates the program into Core, does some Core-to-Core transformations
(I have no idea what transformations), and finally feeds that into a
code generator - either assembly or C. That's about all I know. I mean,
I'm *presuming* that the final compiled form is some kind of
graph-reduction machine... but I don't really know.
(On the other hand, presumably the GHC developers spend more time, like,
*developing* GHC rather than writing about how it works...)
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