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<h1>Contributing to nhc98</h1>
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The maintainers of <em>nhc98</em> would very much welcome the
contributions of other developers towards this compiler. Maybe you are
a PhD student looking for a platform to do some experiments on a cool
new compilation technique for functional languages, but you don't want
to write a whole compiler from scratch. Or maybe you are an application
writer who has built up some useful support libraries that you would
like to see others using too. Maybe you just like hacking!
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Our <a href="todo.html">To Do</a> list is really a wishlist, and
contains some ideas for projects you might like to take on. In
addition:
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<b>Libraries.</b> A couple of the standard Haskell'98 libraries remain
only partially implemented in <em>nhc98</em>. If you have
expertise in an appropriate area (e.g. random number generation), we'd
love it if you could supply a good implementation. If you have ideas
for other useful libraries that you can contribute to the whole Haskell
community, we'd like to see your code too.
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<b>Runtime system.</b> A contributor (Julian Seward, Hugs/ghc
integration person) suggested some small changes to the
the runtime system (in the bytecode interpretive loop) which
yielded a 25% speedup for most programs. Has anyone else got any
good ideas?
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<b>Native code generation.</b> Nhc98 achieves portability by compiling
to bytecode. However, we sacrifice some speed advantages by doing this.
It shouldn't be too difficult to add a native code generator for some
particular machine. We'd be really interested if you came up with
a general scheme for native code generation, parameterised on
the particular machine description, as this would enable support for
new machines to be added very easily.
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<b>Compiler.</b> Although the compiler is currently not documented very
well, we are gradually building up an
<a href="implementation-notes/index.html">implementation map</a> which should
help you get started. In fact, the internals of <em>nhc98</em> are very
straightforward, following textbook guidelines at most points.
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The latest updates to these pages are available on the WWW from
<a href="http://www.haskell.org/nhc98/">
<tt>http://www.haskell.org/nhc98/</tt></a>
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This page last modified: 25 April 2001<br>
<a href="http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/">
York Functional Programming Group</a><br>
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