Papers related to GHC

Here we've collected together lots of documentation and papers that generally describe stuff we've implemented in GHC.

All docs are gzipped A4 Postscript unless otherwise specified.

• The Concurrent Haskell Foreign Function Interface. This document is a draft Haskell addendum that describes GHC's approach to concurrency and its interaction with the FFI and OS threads.

• An External Representation for the GHC Core Language. This document describes the syntax of GHC Core (.hcr) files, which can be used to feed GHC intermediate code to other (non-GHC) back-end processors.

• Haskell Execution Platform design document. This document describes the design for an integrated compiler/interpreter API for executing Haskell programs, which forms the heart of the combined Hugs/GHC system.

• Run-time System document. This document (is supposed to) describe the new run-time system in GHC 4.xx. Be warned that the implementation and this document are evolving in parallel, so they might not be quite in sync.

•  The Spineless Tagless G-Machine. This paper describes the execution model used by GHC. It is most relevant to GHC up to version 3.xx---in version 4 we made some changes which are described in the RTS document.

• The UsageSP analysis (ghc/compiler/usageSP/) is described in Keith Wansbrough and Simon Peyton Jones,  Once Upon a Polymorphic Type, Technical Report TR-1998-19, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, 1998. Conference version  Once Upon a Polymorphic Type, in The Twenty-sixth ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, January 20-22, 1999, San Antonio, Texas.

• GHC's typechecker implementation is described in the paper  Type classes in Haskell, CV Hall, K Hammond, SL Peyton Jones, and PL Wadler, European Symposium On Programming, LNCS 788, Springer Verlag, pp. 241-256, April 1994.

• The New GHC/Hugs Runtime System---a summary of the RTS document.

•  Asynchronous Exceptions in Haskell

•  Lightweight Extensible Records for Haskell

•  Derivable Type Classes

•  Pattern Guards and Transformational Patterns

•  Secrets of the GHC inliner

•  Non-stop Haskell the workings of an incremental garbage collector (not included in GHC, so far).

• Concurrent Haskell

•  Imprecise Exceptions, Co-Inductively

• A semantics for imprecise exceptions

• Imperative Functional Programming

• Lazy Functional State Threads

• Unboxed Values as First-Class Citizens

• Time and Space Profiling for non-stict, higher-order functional programs

• The Glasgow Haskell Compiler - a Technical Overview - from 1992, not entirely relevant any more.

• Adding an Optimisation Pass to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (Olaf Chitil). Somewhat out of date.