Glasgow Haskell Compiler

The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, more commonly known as the Glasgow Haskell Compiler or simply GHC, is an open source native code compiler for the functional programming language Haskell. It provides a cross-platform environment for the writing and testing of Haskell code and it supports numerous extensions, libraries, and optimizations that streamline the process of generating and executing code. The lead developers are Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow. It is distributed along with the Haskell Platform.

GHC originally started in 1989 as a prototype, written in LML (Lazy ML) by Kevin Hammond at the University of Glasgow. Later that year, the prototype was completely rewritten in Haskell, except for its parser, by Cordelia Hall, Will Partain, and Simon Peyton Jones. Its first beta release was on April 1, 1991 and subsequent releases added a strictness analyzer as well as language extensions such as monadic I/O, mutable arrays, unboxed data types, concurrent and parallel programming models (such as software transactional memory and data parallelism) and a profiler.

Peyton Jones, as well as Marlow, later moved to Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, where they continued to be primarily responsible for developing GHC. GHC also contains code from more than three hundred other contributors. Since 2009, third-party contributions to GHC have been funded by the Industrial Haskell Group.