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by YorkshireSeason 2654 days ago
For those who are not Haskell experts, Core is a small lambda-calculus with case (pattern matching), let and coercions, see [1] for details. STG stands for Spineless-Tagless G-machine and is a refinement of the older G-machine. The G-machine (short for Graph-Reduction Machine) is for the lazy (call-by-need) evaluation of functional programs in supercombinator form [4]. Instead of interpreting supercombinators as rewrite rules, they were compiled into sequential code with special instructions for graph manipulation. See [2].

For a general overview of GHC's architecture, see [3].

[1] A. Tolmach, T. Chevalier and the GHC Team, An External Representation for the GHC Core Language (For GHC 6.10). https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/6.12.2/docs/core.pdf

[2] S. Peyton Jones, Implementing lazy functional languages on stock hardware: the Spineless Tagless G-machine. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

[3] S. Marlow, S. Peyton-Jones, The Glasgow Haskell Compiler. https://www.aosabook.org/en/ghc.html

[4] https://wiki.haskell.org/Super_combinator