GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler)
Shares rank 6 of 26 compilers by recommenders
Widely recommended Haskell compiler, praised for smart incremental recompilation, concurrency and a working WebAssembly backend. Critics point to hard-to-bootstrap, non-reproducible builds.
Widely recommended Haskell compiler, praised for smart incremental recompilation, concurrency and a working WebAssembly backend. Critics point to hard-to-bootstrap, non-reproducible builds.
37 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 22
- criticize it
- 15
- approval share
- 59%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 22 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.4 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Smart incremental recompilation
“I recommend anybody who's interested in incremental recompilation to read what GHC does, because the effort to achieve that is relatively low.”
Comment from 28 Jul 2026 in “Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals” “Haskell has `ghc --make` which compiles the whole project in one compiler invocation, with very smart recompilation avoidance”
Comment from 8 Mar 2026 in “A Decade of Docker Containers” “I recommend anybody who's interested in incremental recompilation to read what GHC does”
Comment from 28 Jul 2026 in “Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals” - Comment from 19 Jul 2026 in “Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now”
Robust, works out of the box
“Demonstrating GHC's ability to compile itself to WASM is thus a show that it is robust enough to compile a very complicated program”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 in “GHC now runs in the browser” “GHC and the RTS work flawlessly out of the box”
Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “Explore union types in C# 15” Strong WebAssembly backend
“Demonstrating GHC's ability to compile itself to WASM is thus a show that it is robust enough to compile a very complicated program”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 in “GHC now runs in the browser” “Upstream ghc cancompile to wasm for several major releases now”
Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “Road to Elm 1.0” “it demonstrates how far the ghc wasm backend has come”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 in “GHC now runs in the browser”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Hard to bootstrap from source
“it is hard to take a language seriously or trust it with no way to bootstrap it from source”
Comment from 1 Nov 2025 in “GHC now runs in the browser” “Your link details building GHC with an existing non reproducible GHC compiler binary”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “GHC now runs in the browser” “GHC has a recursive dependency on itself with no way to go back before that loop.”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “GHC now runs in the browser” Non-reproducible output across builds
“The Haskell compiler creates a slightly different output every time you compile a program”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “GHC now runs in the browser” “Your link details building GHC with an existing non reproducible GHC compiler binary”
Comment from 2 Nov 2025 in “GHC now runs in the browser” Needs extensions or compiler flags
“I've written anything in Haskell, I feel like I have to do a million compiler extensions”
Comment from 27 Sep 2026 in “Go Concurrency Distilled” “Having to enable them in the code is just a hassle.”
Comment from 21 May 2026 in “Haskell Foundation 2026 Update” “I would be fighting GHC usually with some flags”
Comment from 6 Feb 2026 in “The Monad Called Free”
Other compilers people recommend
The four most recommended other compilers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GCC | 138 | 123 | 53% | 12 | 15 yrs9 owners | — |
| Clang | 74 | 50 | 60% | 12 | — | — |
| Free Pascal compiler | 38 | 7 | 84% | 11 | — | Approved |
| GraalVM Native Image | 31 | 9 | 78% | 11 | — | Approved |
| GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler)This page | 22 | 15 | 59% | 7 | — | — |
What people said
37 of the 40 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“The former has been languishing behind comparatively”
“That worked fine through the initial build out”
“GHC for the release build”
“I've written anything in Haskell, I feel like I have to do a million compiler extensions”
“given the amount of structural obliteration you get out of GHC, image-based development sounds like a really bad idea”
“as long as the backend is still the same. Well, when I say Haskell, I mean ghc.”
“because the effort to achieve that is relatively low.”
“I recommend anybody who's interested in incremental recompilation to read what GHC does, because the effort to achieve that is relatively low.”
“I recommend anybody who's interested in incremental recompilation to read what GHC does”
“No need to compile everything if you’re just experimenting.”
“Upstream ghc cancompile to wasm for several major releases now”
“I'm just not going to stop using the most widely used version controller, or Haskell”
“or Haskell, just for some guy's (forkable, AGPL licensed) hobby project.”
“GHC2021 and GHC2024 help to do this for the community at large.”
“but it's still awful to use”
“Having to enable them in the code is just a hassle.”
“I still couldn't get GHC to generate the library with Haskell's Runtime (RTS) statically linked.”
“GHC and the RTS work flawlessly out of the box”
“has the best concurrency story among high-level programming languages”
“Haskell has `ghc --make` which compiles the whole project in one compiler invocation, with very smart recompilation avoidance”
“Simon Peyton Jones (GHC/Verse)”
“GHC, which decided to invent it's own build system and install script”
“hitting all kinds of problems”
“I would be fighting GHC usually with some flags”
“often took 12+ hours to compile on some older notebooks”
“whoever decides the GHC release numbers should be pulled aside and given a quick talk about how version numbers are supposed to work”
“the implementation on top of stack switching seems to outperform other implementation strategies”
“GHC has a recursive dependency on itself with no way to go back before that loop.”
“Your link details building GHC with an existing non reproducible GHC compiler binary”
“GHC is inferior at every single point, and it's not slight.”
“The Haskell compiler creates a slightly different output every time you compile a program”
“Cannot paste into the editor (safari on iphone).”
“it is hard to take a language seriously or trust it with no way to bootstrap it from source”
“it demonstrates how far the ghc wasm backend has come”
“while the compiler is awesome and so is the research”
“This is very impressive. Something like this would have simplified that a lot.”
“Demonstrating GHC's ability to compile itself to WASM is thus a show that it is robust enough to compile a very complicated program”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.