High-level architecture

The asterius project is hosted at GitHub. The monorepo contains several packages:

• asterius. This is the central package of the asterius compiler.

• binaryen. It contains the latest source code of the C++ library binaryen in tree, and provides complete raw bindings to its C API.

• ghc-toolkit. It provides a framework for implementing Haskell-to-X compilers by retrieving ghc's various types of in-memory intermediate representations. It also contains the latest source code of ghc-prim/integer-gmp/integer-simple/base in tree.

• wasm-toolkit. It implements the WebAssembly AST and binary encoder/decoder in Haskell, and is now the default backend for generating WebAssembly binary code.

The asterius package provides an ahc executable which is a drop-in replacement of ghc to be used with Setup configure. ahc redirects all arguments to the real ghc most of the time, but when it's invoked with the --make major mode, it invokes ghc with its frontend plugin. This is inspired by Edward Yang's How to integrate GHC API programs with Cabal.

Based on ghc-toolkit, asterius implements a ghc frontend plugin which translates Cmm to binaryen IR. The serialized binaryen IR can then be loaded and linked to a WebAssembly binary (not implemented yet). The normal compilation pipeline which generates native machine code is not affected.

About "booting"

In order for asterius to support non-trivial Haskell programs (that is, at least most things in Prelude), it needs to run the compilation process for base and its dependent packages. This process is known as "booting".

The asterius package provides an ahc-boot test suite which tests booting by compiling the wired-in packages provided by ghc-toolkit and using ahc to replace ghc when configuring. This is inspired by Joachim Breitner's veggies.