This is the source tree for [GHC] 1, a compiler and interactive environment for the Haskell functional programming language.
For more information, visit [GHC's web site] 1.
Information for developers of GHC can be found on the [GHC Trac] 2.
There are two ways to get a source tree:
- Download source tarballs
Download the GHC source distribution:
ghc-<version>-src.tar.bz2
which contains GHC itself and the "boot" libraries.
- Check out the source code from git
First clone the GHC github read-only repository:
$ git clone git://github.com/ghc/ghc.git
Then run the sync-all script in that repository to get the other repositories:
$ cd ghc
$ ./sync-all get
This checks out the "boot" packages.
DO NOT submit pull request directly to the github repo. See the GHC developer team's working conventions re contributing patches.
For full information on building GHC, see the [GHC Building Guide] 3. Here follows a summary - if you get into trouble, the Building Guide has all the answers.
Before building GHC you may need to install some other tools and libraries. See, [Setting up your system for building GHC] 8.
NB. In particular, you need [GHC] 1 installed in order to build GHC, because the compiler is itself written in Haskell. You also need [Happy] 4, [Alex] 5, and [Cabal] 9. For instructions on how to port GHC to a new platform, see the [GHC Building Guide] 3.
For building library documentation, you'll need [Haddock] 6. To build the compiler documentation, you need a good DocBook XML toolchain and dblatex.
Quick start: the following gives you a default build:
$ perl boot
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
The perl boot step is only necessary if this is a tree checked out
from git. For source distributions downloaded from [GHC's web site] 1,
this step has already been performed.
These steps give you the default build, which includes everything
optimised and built in various ways (eg. profiling libs are built).
It can take a long time. To customise the build, see the file HACKING.
Once you have a build you need to keep it going. You need to keep all repos in sync with the [sync-all script] 7. To get the latest changes:
$ ./sync-all pull
$ ./sync-all get
Please see the list of GHC contributors.