What’s needed to bootstrap GHC with hugs?

[atravers]

@AntC2

So how early did GHC cease using Hugs to get compiled?

There seems to be some confusion about the origins of GHC, which is somewhat unusual considering the relevant information has been widely available since 2007:

(page 28 of 55)

9.1 The Glasgow Haskell Compiler

Probably the most fully featured Haskell compiler today is the
Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), an open-source project with a
liberal BSD-style licence.

GHC was begun in January 1989 at the University of Glasgow, as
soon as the initial language design was fixed. The first version of
GHC was written in LML by Kevin Hammond, and was essentially
a new front end to the Chalmers LML compiler. This prototype
started to work in June 1989, just as Peyton Jones arrived in Glas-
gow to join the burgeoning functional programming group there.
The prototype compiler implemented essentially all of Haskell 1.0
including views (later removed), type classes, the deriving mecha-
nism, the full module system, and binary I/O as well as both streams
and continuations. […]

GHC proper was begun in the autumn of 1989, by a team consist-
ing initially of Cordelia Hall, Will Partain, and Peyton Jones. It
was designed from the ground up as a complete implementation of
Haskell in Haskell, bootstrapped via the prototype compiler. […]

A History of Haskell: Being Lazy With Class (Paul Hudak, John Hughes,
Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler).

As I dimly recall, the only time GHC and Hugs were ever really “connected” was in the STGHugs project, which gave rise to GHCi as we now know it (because it was then simpler to implement a new interpreter in Glasgow Haskell instead of trying to keep GHC and Hugs “in harmony”).

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@nomeata

we still don’t have a bootstrappable GHC build […] and that it would would be nice to have.

…but why (re)try bootstrapping with STGHugs (as previously noted here) when you now have (preliminary) support for WebAssembly in GHC. It might be easier to use wasm as a “pseudo-UNCOL”, with trusted interpreters then running the wasm-version of GHC to then bootstrap GHC from source.