nhc - Nearly a Haskell Compiler

This paper describes nhc a compiler for a subset of Haskell. Nhc is the result of the author’s wish to have a Haskell compiler for his Acorn A5000 to play with. Previous the only Haskell system available for A5000 was Mark Jones’ gofer. The disadvantage of gofer is that it is written in C so the play part isn’t as fun as it could be. Nhc is written in Haskell with a small run-time system in C. It's possible to re-compile nhc with itself in 3MB of memory, using a lot of time. But as long as the interfaces between modules don’t change then the turn around time is quite tolerable. Nhc can profile the use of memory to make it easier to detect space leaks in programs. The profiling includes: What created the nodes in the heap? What does the heap consist of? How long time do the nodes in the heap live? Who is retaining the nodes?