S. Alexander Jacobson wrote: > On Thu, 2 Apr 1998, Fergus Henderson wrote: > > On 01-Apr-1998, S. Alexander Jacobson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > Not having written a compiler before, this may be an ignorant question, > > > but how come you write these Haskell compilers/interpreters in C/C++ > > > rather than bootstrapping from prior versions of Haskell itself? > > > > Gofer (and hence Hugs) was written in C for efficiency. > > > > ghc was written in Haskell, and hence is big, fat, and slow. > > Please correct me if I am wrong ;-) > > I realize this was written in good humor, but doesn't it serve as an > indictment of Haskell as a general purpose language? I believe the Gnu > compilers are bootstrapped. Only if you wish to judge the language by the very small handful of initial implementations. The Gnu compilers are big and fat, but not so slow because the language being compiled is comparatively close to the underlying machine architecture. Also, the art of compiling languages like C is very well developed. And let's not forget the hordes of people who contribute to the Gnu compilers, as opposed to the very small number working on Haskell compilers. I don't think there's any need to lose faith based on the evidence of hugs and GHC. I suspect when hugs was written that GHC was simply not a viable implementation platform. However, I further suspect that GHC has come a long way since then. Perhaps the exercise of implementing the hugs interpreter in Haskell should be tried now. I'm game for the exercise - anyone else? --Jeff
