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.

See also our working conventions WorkingConventions, covering Git workflows, bug tracker, coding conventions etc.

Contents

Building GHC

• Setting up your system for building GHC
• Getting the sources
• Just building and installing GHC
• Platforms that GHC currently supports
• The GHC Builder, which coordinates distributed nightly builds

Getting started for developers

• Getting started with the build system
• How do I re-build after updating or changing GHC?
• FAQ: Solving common problems with building GHC. If anything goes wrong, look here first.

More detailed information about using the build system

• Using the build system
• Standard targets
• Validating changes
• Running the GHC test framework
• The NoFib benchmark suite
• Testing GHC against all of Hackage
• Debugging and performance-tuning for GHC

• GHC and the libraries on which it depends
• Installing extra packages for your in-place GHC

• Building the documentation
• Installing GHC from a build
• Unregisterised builds
• Porting GHC to a new platform
• Cross-compilation

More detailed information about how the build system works

• Overview of files and directories
• Architecture of the build system
• Modifying the build system

Platform-specific building instructions:

• Building under Windows
• Building under MacOS X
• Building under Solaris

Contributed documentation

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

• SonyPS3 : Hints for building on the Sony PS3