nhc13 to-do list

Our plans for nhc13 include the following.

• The release of the new stable, standard, Haskell 98 report is imminent. We plan to support this standard fully. The compiler will probably be renamed nhc98 when this is complete.
• The Fudgets GUI library was once available for nhc13, but needs updating. Niklas is working on adding existential types for this purpose.
• The implementation of GreenCard should be finished. Remaining unimplemented features include named field syntax and failure specifications.
• It would be very useful to have a set of simple regression tests (with an automated interface) to check whether anything breaks on a new machine architecture, or after modifying a part of the compiler. (We have a set of tests for the binary libraries, and they have definitely proved their worth!)
• As part of the cross-compilation idea, it might be important to be able to pass the word-size of the target machine into the compiler at compile-time. (It is currently hard-coded in.)
• Some new libraries are now being standardised between ghc and Hugs - there should be an nhc13 implementation of some of these too.
• We would like to replace the current textual format of interface files with a binary format. (We conjecture a big speed gain during compilation.) One difficulty is that nhc13 is often built with hbc, which does not yet support Binary. However, it would be of even greater interest to obtain a speed gain when using an nhc13 built with nhc13!
• We hope to continue to improve the tracer, supporting some of the more tricky language features, and eventually adding a meta-tracer for defining and using trace strategies.

The latest updates to these pages are available on the WWW from http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/nhc13/

1998.11.05
York Functional Programming Group
Malcolm.Wallace@cs.york.ac.uk