There are several people now interested in working on turning GHC into a Real Cross Compiler (something akin to the design laid out here.) This page covers that WIP, as well as architectural/design notes.

Current work

• Brian Bloniarz implemented a cross compilation mode for hsc2hs. You can find the patches here. These have yet to be merged by GHC HQ, but we would like them to be!

• Dan Knapp is working on the native code generators - removing everything that uses the pre-processor and instead threading an Architecture type through the compiler, containing ABI information so we can generate the correct code at runtime. You can check out his work by doing

  darcs get http://dankna.com/software/darcs/ghc-darcs-dnk-cross-compilation/

Other things worth considering/need doing/questions

• The build system. This is the Big Mother - the design is laid out here. There are various things worth considering, like the fact that GHC builds programs as part of the build routine which it then uses, etc.
• Will the RTS need modifications? We must build it multiple times with both the host and target toolchain C compilers, so it should mostly be OK, but we may need to do more

Design notes

TODO FIXME