Building and Porting GHC

This Guide is primarily aimed at those who want to build and/or hack on GHC. It describes how to get started with building GHC on your machine, and how to tweak the settings to get the kind of build you want. It also describes the inner workings of the build system, so you can extend it, modify it, and use it to build your code.

Contents

Building GHC

• Getting the sources
• Platforms that GHC currently supports
• What tools you need
• Just building and installing GHC

Getting started for developers

• Controlling your build
• Useful workflows and makefile targets (new)
• How do I re-build after updating or changing GHC?
• Layout of the source tree

More detailed information about the build system

• Using the build system
• Installing GHC from a build
• Architecture of the build system
• Building the documentation
• Unregisterised builds
• Porting GHC
• Running the GHC test framework
• The NoFib benchmark suite

Platform-specific guidance

• Platforms, scripts, and file names
• Building under Windows
• Building under MacOS X
• Building under Solaris

FAQ

• Solving common problems with building GHC

Contributed documentation

Please feel free to add pages here. In due course, information can be incorporated into the main documentation above.

• ProblemsCompilingGhc: Hints about building GHC on Windows platforms (somewhat obsolete)
• SonyPS3 : Hints for building on the Sony PS3
• Code coverage of our testsuite