What’s needed to bootstrap GHC with hugs?

[AntC2]

@linj

replace Hugs in the bootstrap chain of GHC?

Thanks linj, it’s pretty clear from the discussion above Hugs was never used to bootstrap GHC.

@nomeata

bootstrap MicroHS. Maybe Hugs can do that?

Also note that there is no need to have a Haskell compiler to run MicroHs. All you need is a C compiler, and MicroHs can bootstrap, given the included combinator file.

Hugs won’t know anything about those combinators. (Unless, I suppose, you create an interpreter for them.) And anyway we never got to the bottom of whether Hugs is genuinely bootstrappable from C++.

[atravers]

@nomeata

MicroHS isn’t bootstrappable itself (in the sense of https://bootstrappable.org/) – it builds off he pre-generated C files in generated.

And most C compilers have been compiled from older versions of themselves.

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@linj, my advice would be to find the latest version of GHC:

• that can be compiled by MicroHs,
• and can compile MicroHs.

Then you or anyone else can use the mitigation technique Yrjan Skrimstad describes in his thesis. The resulting version of GHC can then be used to start the (long) sequence of compilations needed to arrive at the current version of GHC.