A compiler for a subset of Haskell to Combinatory Logic

Adapted from the original version by Ben Lynn

This is an elaboration and annotation of Ben Lynn's Haskell compiler and C VM. The main aim is to improve upon the compiler, in various layers (see Future plans).

Features

• Valid subset of Haskell! Code works on GHC as long as you have curly braces and delimiters as needed (see classy.hs)
• Type inference, type classes, algebraic data types
• Pure! The last function defined should be a function of type String -> String, which will receive input from stdin and whose output will be printed to the console
• VM (~350 SLOC) is written in ANSI C and works on 32 and 64-bit systems
• Compiles to combinatory logic (CL), evaluation proceeds via graph reduction

Usage

./blynn <binary> <input> <output>

Where binary is the CL program to run, input is the file whose contents are passed to the program, and output is the file to write the output to.

Building

Requirements

• An ANSI C compiler and make. That's it!

Testing

To check self-compilation, run ./check.sh classy.hs. It does the following:

• Run classy (compiler binary) on classy.hs (compiler source), producing classy2
• Run classy2 on classy.hs, producing classy3
• Check that classy2 and classy3 are identical

If you've made a change to what classy.hs outputs, (e.g. an optimization to code generation), run ./check_compile.sh classy.hs instead. It adds another step to the same process in check.sh to ensure that the changes propagate.

Future plans

Bootstrapping

• Create bootstrapping path from original classy compiler

C runtime

• Monadic I/O
  • putc, getc, filesystems
  • Combinators should take a continuation, doing I/O then passing the result to the continuation
• Alternate VM in Forth?

Compiler

Initial phase; parsing and totality, then reduce heap usage.

• Use more typeclasses in this compiler
• Remove undefined, only use total functions
• "Don't pay for what you don't use" (only emit code for functions referenced from main)
• Convert to CPS and perform partial evaluation

Parser

• Rewrite in applicative style with typeclasses
• Add block comments
• Use Parsec-style parsing
• Better parser error messages
  • Writer show instance for Msg
• do notation
  • Implement layout parsing, as in this paper

Types

• Separation of Char and Int types
• Add more types to the standard prelude
• Allow class constraint in class declaration like (class Functor f => Applicative f where ...)
• Multi-parameter typeclasses
• Dependent/linear types?