Thanks Lennart (x 2, yes your first was rather ‘open to interpretation’).
It’s your pet project, so of course be as non-tedious as you choose. To bootstrap ghc+supporting packages I’m sure you don’t need IncoherentInstances nor its scary friends. Once you have ghc, can’t you lean on that for the option-handling?
I’m worried the complexity you’re saving is not just option-handling but sanity-checking of instance coherence and overlap. Ghc is already bad enough; is MicroHS worse in allowing nonsense? (See trac #10675 and links.)
I’m not seeing the merit of a compiler/supported language that slavishly follows ghc and its warts and ugliness.