GHC Commentary: The Compiler
The compiler itself is written entirely in Haskell, and lives in the many sub-directories of the compiler directory.
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Compiler Module Dependencies (deals with the arcane mutual recursions among GHC's many data types)
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Compiling one module: GHC.Driver.Main
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Overview gives the big picture.
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Some details of the parser
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Some details of the renamer
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Some details of the typechecker
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Some details of the simplifier
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Some details of the code generator converts STG to Cmm
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Backends convert Cmm to native code:
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A guide to the generated assembly code
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Entities: variables (Var), type constructors (TyCon), data constructors (DataCon), and classes (Class).
- Tying the knot: how we build the circular data structure representing entities
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Types:
Case studies:
Overall Structure
Here is a block diagram of its top-level structure:
GHC.Driver.Main(formerly known as HscMain) deals with compiling a single module. On top of this is built the compilation manager (in blue) that manages the compilation of multiple modules. It exports an interface called the GHC API. On top of this API are four small front ends:
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GHCi, the interactive environment, is implemented in ghc/GHCi/UI.hs and compiler/GHC/Runtime/Eval.hs. It sits squarely on top of the GHC API.
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--make
is almost a trivial client of the GHC API, and is implemented in compiler/GHC/Driver/Make.hs. -
-M
, the Makefile dependency generator, is also a client of the GHC API and is implemented in compiler/GHC/Driver/MakeFile.hs. -
The "one-shot" mode, where GHC compiles each file on the command line separately (eg.
ghc -c Foo.hs
). This mode bypasses the GHC API, and is implemented directly on top of GHC.Driver.Main, since it compiles only one file at a time. In fact, this is all that
GHC consisted of prior to version 5.00 when GHCi and--make
were introduced.
GHC is packaged as a single binary in which all of these front-ends are present, selected by the command-line flags indicated above. There is a single command-line interface implemented in ghc/Main.hs.
In addition, GHC is compiled, without its front ends, as a library which can be imported by any Haskell program; see the GHC API.