From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Sep 12 2: 7:44 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from inet-vrs-02.microsoft.com (mail2.microsoft.com [131.107.3.124]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 321B514BD4 for ; Sun, 12 Sep 1999 02:07:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from simonmar@microsoft.com) Received: from 157.54.9.104 by inet-vrs-02.microsoft.com (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Sun, 12 Sep 1999 02:07:16 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time) Received: by INET-IMC-02 with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0) id ; Sun, 12 Sep 1999 02:07:15 -0700 Message-ID: <8B57882C41A0D1118F7100805F9F68B51232C0E2@RED-MSG-45> From: Simon Marlow To: "'hackers@freebsd.org'" Subject: How to go about making a compiler port Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 02:07:15 -0700 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0) Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [originally sent to ports, resending to hackers at the suggestion of someone on that list.] Hi Folks, I'd like to make a port for our Haskell compiler, GHC (see http://research.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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message