Lambda the Ultimate

When I first started to learn Haskell in 1999, I decided I needed a project. Haskell was my first (modern) functional language and I was seduced by its robust strong type system and efficiency gains. After writing a toy ray-tracer (my usual first project in a new language) it was clear I needed to try something somewhat more challenging and jhc was born. My reasoning was simple, by writing a Haskell compiler in Haskell I will double my language learning speed since I will not only have to learn how to program in it by forcing myself to complete a non-trivial project, but also its subtle semantics and dark corners since I actually needed to implement it correctly. Writing a compiler is also doubly efficient to begin with, since if you self-compile improvements not only give you a better optimizer, but also speed up your self-compiled compiler. All in all I figure I was making very good use of my time. For some reason, when I explain my reasoning to other people they look at me like I am crazy, but I can detect no flaw in my logic.

I can't fault him!

good look to them. i found that even on only moderate sized programs the whole-program optimizing ml compiler mlton took too long to be useful for incremental develoment (although it would be fine for a final compile, i guess).

(i should add that otherwise it was a very solid compiler with good support!)