Compiling Haskell by Program Transformation: A Report from the Trenches

  • Simon Peyton Jones

in Proceedings European Symposium on Programming (ESOP'96)

Published by Springer | 1996, Vol 1058 | Lecture Notes in Computer Science edition

Many compilers do some of their work by means of correctness-preserving, and hopefully performance-improving, program transformations. The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) takes this idea of “compilation by transformation” as its war-cry, trying to express as much as possible of the compilation process in the form of program transformations.

This paper reports on our practical experience of the transformational approach to compilation, in the context of a substantial compiler.

See “A transformation-based optimiser for Haskell” (SCP 1997) for a journal version of this paper.