Abstract
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) started as part of an academic research project funded by the UK government at the beginning of the 1990’s, with several goals in mind:
- To make freely available a robust and portable compiler for Haskell that generates high performance code;
- To provide a modular foundation that other researchers can extend and develop;
- To learn how real programs behave, so that we can design and build better compilers.
GHC is now over 20 years old, and has been under continuous active development since its inception. Today, GHC releases are downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people, the online repository of Haskell libraries has over 3,000 packages, GHC is used to teach Haskell in many undergraduate courses, and there are a growing number of instances of Haskell being depended upon commercially.