Notes From a Beginning GHC Hacker

General notes on hacking (in Windows)

1. The Building Guide is very good, read the appropriate parts.
2. Optimize your set up for build speed. Having to wait 10 minutes to compile because you added an export to a critical module is no fun.
   1. Use MSYS, not cygwin. MSYS is much faster.
   2. Do not use -O to compile GHC while you are making heavy changes. Once things compile smoothly and you want to test it, compile with optimization (on my machine, adding -O triples the compile time for a fresh 'make').
3. If you do a 'make tags' then you can go right to the definition of a function (from any module) using alt-. in emacs.