CoreDump

This is a GHC plugin for dumping GHC's internal Core data structures(CoreProgram, CoreSyn etc.) in a readable yet completely exposed way.

When studying GHC's internals most of the time I want to see generated Core for an expression, or how a particular type/data constructor etc. is used internally. GHC provides no easy for this. Outputable.pprTrace and other functions in Outputable module help, but they don't solve the problem because

1. they use Outputable instances, which hide lots of details 2) we have to modify GHC and recompile it to print things we're interested in, which takes a lot of time.

This library derives orphan Show instances for GHC internals as much as possible. When not possible(because of a hidden constructor), it tries hard to print something as similar to the original type as possible.

Currently these types are only printed as "<TypeName>":

• Class.Class
• CoreSyn.RuleFun (which is a function type)
• UniqFM.UniqFM
• Coercion.Coercion

Show instances of these types are same as Outputable instances:

• Name.Name
• OccName.OccName

Other than these, Show instances for pretty much every Core-level data structure are implemented.

Usage

After installing as usual:

$ ghc --make -fplugin=CoreDump -fplugin-opt=CoreDump:both Hello.hs

-fplugin-opt=CoreDump:both part is for telling the plugin when to dump Core. Valid arguments are: (to be used in place of both)

• before: Print before Core-to-Core passes.
• after: Print after Core-to-Core passes.
• both: Print before and after Core-to-Core passes.

If you want to follow some other plugin's transformations, make sure to pass other plugin after passing CoreDump, in command line. Example:

$ ghc --make -fplugin=CoreDump -fplugin-opt=CoreDump:both -fplugin=Test Hello.hs

This will dump the Core, run the plugin named Test, and then dump the Core again.

If you move -fplugin=Test part before -fplugin=CoreDump, then GHC installs Test after installing CoreDump, so depending on how Test plugin installs itself, you may not be able to dump Core output before or after Test runs.