Building and Porting GHC

This Guide is primarily aimed at those who want to build and/or hack on GHC. It describes how to get started with building GHC on your machine, and how to tweak the settings to get the kind of build you want. It also describes the inner workings of the build system, so you can extend it, modify it, and use it to build your code.

Contents

Getting started

• Setting up your system for building GHC (including platform specific instructions)
• Getting the sources
• Quick Start: just build GHC
• Newcomers should also go to Newcomers.

More detailed information about using the build system

• Using the build system
• Standard targets
• Making GHC's source code searchable with Hoogle
• Building the documentation
• Installing GHC from a build
• Unregisterised builds

How to test and benchmark GHC

• Validating Patches
• Running the regression test suite
• Testing GHC against all of Hackage
• The NoFib benchmark suite

Information about libraries (= packages)

• Installing extra libraries for your in-place GHC
• The libraries on which GHC depends

More detailed information about how the build system works

• Overview of files and directories
• Architecture of the build system
• Modifying the build system

Porting GHC and building cross compilers

• Platforms that GHC currently supports
• Cross-compilation
• Compiling for 32 bits on 64 bits
• Setting up a Debian system to build a GHC cross-compiler
• Some notes on the various moving parts involved in the Windows toolchain

Troubleshooting

• FAQ: Solving common problems with building GHC

Contributed documentation

Please feel free to add pages here. In due course, information can be incorporated into the main documentation above.

• SonyPS3 : Hints for building on the Sony PS3
• Arm64 : An attempt to cross-compile GHC for Android on ARM64.