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  • David Himmelstrup's avatar
    Initial hack on the new low-level compiler API. · 3abbe090
    David Himmelstrup authored
    None of the new code is in use yet.
    
    The current Haskell compiler (HscMain.hscMain) isn't as typed
    and as hack-free as we'd like. Here's a list of the things it
    does wrong:
      * In one shot mode, it returns the new interface as _|_,
        when recompilation isn't required. It's then up to the
        users of hscMain to keep their hands off the result.
      * (Maybe ModIface) is passed around when it's known that it's
        a Just. Hey, we got a type-system, let's use it.
      * In one shot mode, the backend is returning _|_ for the
        new interface. This is done to prevent space leaks since
        we know that the result of a one shot compilation is never
        used. Again, it's up to the users of hscMain to keep their
        hands off the result.
      * It is allowed to compile a hs-boot file to bytecode even
        though that doesn't make sense (it always returns
        Nothing::Maybe CompiledByteCode).
      * Logic and grunt work is completely mixed. The frontend
        and backend keeps checking what kind of input they're handling.
        This makes it very hard to get an idea of what the functions
        actually do.
      * Extra work is performed when using a null code generator.
    
    
    The new code refactors out the frontends (Haskell, Core), the
    backends (Haskell, boot) and the code generators (one-shot, make,
    nothing, interactive) and allows them to be combined in typesafe ways.
    A one-shot compilation doesn't return new interfaces at all so we
    don't need the _|_ space-leak hack. In 'make' mode (when not
    targeting bytecode) the result doesn't contain
    Nothing::Maybe CompiledByteCode. In interactive mode, the result
    is always a CompiledByteCode. The code gens are completely separate
    so compiling to Nothing doesn't perform any extra work.
    
    DriverPipeline needs a bit of work before it can use the new
    API.
    
    3abbe090