Welcome to the GHC Developer Wiki

This is the home for GHC developers, one place for all the resources related to developing GHC. If you're only interested in using GHC, then you probably want  The GHC home page instead.

Please help us improve the information here. You can easily do this by editing the wiki directly. Just log in as user guest with password guest. The "Help/Guide" link at the top of every page gives a good description of the markup language etc.

For a complete list of local wiki pages, see TitleIndex.

Notices

• We ran a GHC Hackathon just before ICFP 2006 in Portland, Oregon. As a result, The GHC Commentary is now completely revised, and it's in the GHC Wiki, so you can help keep it up to date. (For the dedicated, videos of the Simons presenting this material are on the Hackathon page.)

• Internships at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, working on Haskell and GHC

• Our current thinking about enhancing GHC's support for packages?.

Release cycle status

• The GHC 6.6 release cycle has begun, see  this message. Look at the tickets scheduled for 6.6.
• There are now Darcs repositories for the GHC 6.6 branch: ghc-6.6/ghc, ghc-6.6/packages/*, ghc-6.6/testsuite, ghc-6.6/nofib. Bug-fixes only in these repositories, please!
• There will be a 6.4.3, to correct some serious platform-specific bugs in 6.4.2. Look at the tickets scheduled for 6.4.3.

Downloading snapshots

• Download snapshots here. This link also gets you to a typeset user manual for the current snapshot.

The bug tracker

• View tickets: bug reports, tasks, feature requests

• Create a new: bug report, task, feature request

• View tickets assigned to me
• View tickets by milestone
• View tickets by OS
• View tickets by architecture

Getting Started

How to get started with hacking on GHC:

• Grab the latest sources
• Set up your build tree
• Pick an easy bug report or task to work on
• Useful information about GHC's architecture is in the Commentary
• Hack away... ask questions on  the cvs-ghc mailing list
• Submit patches back, using darcs send is the recommended way.

Mailing lists and IRC

GHC developers hang out on the  cvs-ghc mailing list. This list also receives the following:

• checkins on the main ghc repository
• patches sent by darcs send
• nightly build reports

The traffic level varies quite a bit depending on how much activity there is.

Checkins for packages are reported on the  cvs-libraries mailing list. To get mail from all the cvs-* lists, subscribe to the  cvs-all mailing list (but don't post there, please).

GHC developers also hang out on #ghc channel on  FreeNode. This is a good place to ask questions related to working on GHC itself; if you have more general questions then #haskell is probably more appropriate.

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Developer Documentation

This section collects information intended for people who would like to help work on GHC's source code. The most important pieces of documentation are:

• Building and Porting GHC
  All information on getting the sources, building GHC, and porting GHC is here.

• The GHC Commentary
  Documentation on the design, architecture, and implementation of GHC itself, with references to the actual source code.

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Contributors

• The GHC Team