GHC Source Tree Roadmap

The top level of a GHC source tree looks like this:

Documentation

ANNOUNCE

HACKING

LICENSE

README

Configuration

The GNU autoconf machinery:

aclocal.m4

config.guess

config.sub

configure.ac

install-sh

The Build System

See Building/BuildSystem?.

Makefile

Top-level Makefile; make by itself does a full 2-stage bootstrap of GHC, there are also targets for building source and binary distributions. GHC requires  GNU make.

mk/

The guts of the build system itself.

The Code

compat/

A library of compatibility code used when bootstrapping GHC using an older version of GHC. For example, we compile up the version of Cabal from libraries/Cabal and include it in libcompat, this means that the GHC source code can assume the most recent version of Cabal.

compiler/?

The Compiler itself: all Haskell code.

driver/

Historically this contained the Perl script known as the GHC "driver"; in GHC 5.00 the driver was rewritten in Haskell and incorporated into GHC itself when we added GHCi and --make. This directory still contains the mangler? and the splitter? Perl scripts, and a couple of wrappers used to invoke GHC on Windows. Also the package database constructed during a GHC build is stored in here.

libraries/?

The libraries that are built and distributed with GHC.

includes/

Header files for the Runtime System and for compiling Haskell via C.

docs/?

GHC documentation.

quickcheck/

Some quickcheck tests for the compiler (may go away).

rts/

The Runtime System.

utils/?

Various utility programs, either used during the build itself or distributed with GHC.

These two are optional, available as separate darcs repositories:

testsuite/?

The test suite.

nofib/?

The NoFib? benchmark suite.

Distribution

darcs-all

a script for operating on the collection of darcs repositories that makes up the GHC source tree (see Building/GettingTheSources).

distrib/

miscellany for building distributions.

ghc.spec.in

RPM spec file

InstallShield, WindowsInstaller

Windows installer bits