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Date:      Fri, 10 Sep 1999 07:26:01 -0700
From:      Simon Marlow <simonmar@microsoft.com>
To:        "'ports@freebsd.org'" <ports@freebsd.org>
Subject:   How to go about making a compiler port
Message-ID:  <8B57882C41A0D1118F7100805F9F68B51232C0DD@RED-MSG-45>

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Hi Folks,

I'd like to make a port for our Haskell compiler, GHC (see
http://reserach.microsoft.com/users/t-simonm/ghc).  There are some subtle
problems with this:

	- GHC depends on itself.  That is, you need GHC
	  installed in order to build GHC.

	- GHC depends on Happy, our parser generator.
	
	- Happy depends on GHC (it's written in Haskell).

So, one solution would be to provide a binary port, say ghc-bin, which would
install a binary distribution.  I checked the modula-3 port, and it doesn't
seem to have a binary port, so what's the accepted way of doing this?

It's possible to bootstrap GHC from intermediate C files, but it's a bit
fiddly and I'd prefer not to do this if possible.  However, one thing that
occurs to me is that the port could bootstrap itself from C if you say 'make
BOOTSTRAP=YES', and otherwise attempt to build using an installed GHC.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

I'm not on this list, BTW.

Cheers,
	Simon


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