Can the external core be fed back into GHC?

[chrisdone]

One thing people sometimes want is to generate files of GHC’s bytecode. That can make for faster recompilation and even a way to build an “interpreted” exe, both of these could yield much faster dev cycles when the project is large and build times are more painful than runtime. On a project with 1000 modules and lots of TH, that recompiling of bytecode can hurt.

I’m wondering whether one could generate external STG when in GHC’s Interpreted linker mode.

Your external-stg looks like it goes in both directions: stg -> external stg and back. Are there any pitfalls/caveats to its current implementation?

I’m aware that its speed won’t be good because it’s using the binary package, but that’s easily swapped out for something more efficient.

[chrisdone]

Is this the latest version of this code? https://github.com/grin-compiler/ghc-whole-program-compiler-project/tree/master/external-stg-compiler/lib/Stg/GHC

[csabahruska]

Yes, the external-stg-compiler can feed back ext-stg to ghc for codegen. The latest code is available on github. The pipeline does not use the bytecode at all.

[csabahruska]

GHC-WPC does not support external core, only ext-stg. The Core IR is always in flux, that's why.