malcolm

Tom Shackell told me today about his "short weekend" project - he has completely reworked the backend of nhc98, and now has what amounts to the bulk of a new compiler he is provisionally calling "yhc" for York Haskell. Neil thinks he should call it THC (Tom's...) instead. :-)

The whole code generator and runtime system has been replaced. It now generates a platform-independent bytecode stored directly in a binary format, instead of encoding it into platform-specific C arrays that needed further C compilation. There are lots of great things about this. The generated code runs about 20% faster. You can copy the bytecode from one architecture to another without needing to recompile. The high-mem bug in nhc98's garbage collector is gone by default (new heap layout). The bytecodes are dynamically linked, so it should be possible to hot-swap running code a la hs-plugins. It works on 64-bit machines. The runtime system can be compiled natively on Windows with VC++, as well as the original gcc on Unix way.

All very cool. Now we just need to replace the frontend as well - get a decent type inference engine etc. Any volunteers?