While something like a Haskell/OCaml implementation would probably be too cutting-edge, considering the conservative inertia of such a big project, I wonder why

While something like a Haskell/OCaml implementation would probably be too cutting-edge, considering the conservative inertia of such a big project, I wonder why they didn't consider some high-level language better suited for compiler writing. I imagine bootstrapping could be a problem. If GHC needs a C compiler to build itself, and the C compiler needs GHC to build itself, you'll need a good, very portable C compiler to get started - that's GCC. Cross-compiling could perhaps be an option, although GHC doesn't support it for the moment.