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<html><head><title>Release 1.18 of nhc98</title></head>
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<center><h1>Release 1.18 of nhc98</h1></center>
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<h3>Should I use nhc98 or yhc?</h3>
<a href="http://haskell.org/yhc">Yhc</a> is an offshoot of nhc98, with
considerable improvements to the clarity of the implementation code.
It is intended to be faster and better than nhc98. However, the project
is still incomplete, and you should be aware that, in the meantime,
<ul>
<li> nhc98's build system is much more robust than Yhc's. It is more
likely to just work first time (unless you happen to want to build
your compiler on Windows without mingw, and using MS VC++, in which
case Yhc is definitely the way to go.)
<li> nhc98 correctly builds more programs than Yhc. Mainly, Yhc is
missing many standard libraries.
<li> nhc98-built programs run on average 20-40% faster than Yhc-built
programs. In theory, Yhc should be faster, because Yhc executes
fewer bytecodes, and they are simpler, but in practice nhc98 still
wins. See the
<a href="http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/nobench.html">nobench results</a>.
</ul>
<h3>Why use the <em>nhc98</em> Haskell compiler?</h3>
<dl>
<dt><em>Because it is easy to install.</em></dt>
<dd><em>nhc98</em> is very easy to configure and build, even for new machines
which have never seen a Haskell compiler before, and it copes with
Unix, Windows, and MacOS X without difficulty.</dd>
<dt><em>Because you have a small machine.</em></dt>
<dd> <em>nhc98</em> is designed for space-efficiency. Compile the same
program under either <em>ghc</em> or <em>hbc</em>, and compare it with
that produced by <em>nhc98</em>. Generally, <em>nhc98</em> produces
much smaller executables, and runtime space usage is also
<em>very</em> much smaller. (With the <em>nhc98</em> Binary library [1]
you can compress your heap data in addition to the normal savings.)
Expect to pay a speed penalty though - programs produced by
<em>nhc98</em> run between 2x and 6x slower than with <em>ghc</em>
or <em>hbc</em> (although they are still up to 15x faster than
<em>Hugs</em>).</dd>
<dt><em>Because you're a software developer.</em></dt>
<dd> nhc98 comes with comprehensive tool support - hmake, hi, greencard,
heap and time profiling, and <em>two</em> debuggers.
Are you fed up waiting for <em>ghc</em> to compile your programs?
<em>nhc98</em> can be pretty quick at compiling, even though it
is not as fast as <em>hbc</em>. For development work, it can also
provide a useful check that you are sticking to the Haskell 98
standard and avoiding compiler-specific extensions.</dd>
<dt><em>Because your programs have strange space behaviour.</em></dt>
<dd>
<em>nhc98</em> has the most advanced heap profiler in the Haskell
world [2], allowing you to observe in very fine detail exactly what is
happening to the heap. Profile types include producer, construction,
retainer, biography, and lifetime - and any combination thereof.</dd>
<dt><em>Because your program crashes, or produces the wrong output.</em></dt>
<dd>
<em>nhc98</em> has <em>two</em> sets of debugging facilities.
First, Andy Gill's <a href="http://www.haskell.org/hood/">HOOD</a>
library together with his XML-based debugging browser.
Second, York's advanced
<a href="http://www.haskell.org/hat/"><em>Hat</em></a> tracing system
based on augmented redex trails [2,3], which gives you much, much more.
The Hat system (distributed separately from nhc98) provides three different
and complementary browsing tools for exploring the runtime behaviour
of your program.
</dd>
</dl>
<h4>References</h4>
<p>
[1] The Bits Between The Lambdas - Binary Data in a Lazy Functional Language,
Malcolm Wallace and Colin Runciman, Proceedings of the International
Symposium on Memory Management, Vancouver, Oct 1998.
[<a href="ftp://ftp.cs.york.ac.uk/pub/malcolm/ismm98.html">FTP site</a>]
<p>
[2] Heap Profiling for Space Efficiency, Colin Runciman and Niklas Röjemo,
2nd Intl School on Advanced Functional Programming, pp.159-183,
Springer LNCS 1129, Olympia WA, Aug 1996.
[<a href="ftp://ftp.cs.york.ac.uk/pub/colin/advfp96.ps.gz">FTP site</a>]
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<p>
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>
<p>
This page last updated: 28th Feb 2007<br>
<a href="http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/">
York Functional Programming Group</a><br>
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