See chrisdone's comment above. For more details on how GHC began life, check out SPJ's book: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/slpj

See chrisdone's comment above. For more details on how GHC began life, check out SPJ's book: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers/slpj-book-1987/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers... You might also take a look at GRIN. Here's a quote from the GRIN paper: "For a lazy language like Haskell, compilers typically compile one module at a time. At first sight, this might appear as a good opportunity to optimize several procedures at once. However, it seems as if this does not apply very well to low level optimizations, like those presented in this paper, where the actual dynamic control flow is important... In a lazy language, a function that is local to a module in the source code might very well escape from the module at run time (if it is built into a closure) and then be called from somewhere else." I'm very interested in your thoughts on frameworks, but this isn't really the right forum. It's usually pretty easy to catch me in #snapframework on IRC.