Comment by lrvick

My project has no need of Haskell, but if anyone puts in the work to make haskell compileable from only public source code my team and I will put in the work to reproduce, package, and maintain it for the community for free as we do most other languages.

Your link details building GHC with an existing non reproducible GHC compiler binary compiled by a single individual that must be blindly trusted.

Full source bootstrapping means no binary blobs or trust in anyone else needed, which makes supply chain integrity possible. This is a bare minimum for any language to be considered for production use in any environment where security matters.

To me it -is- crazy when a major language compiler skips something so basic, but Haskell did.

To be fair rust team skipped this too, but thankfully rust is popular enough that a community member cared enough about high security applications to write mrustc, a bootstrap rust compiler written in C++. If not for that Rust would be in the same boat as Haskell.

Meanwhile Go and Zig did it right, and have both provided full source bootstrapping instructions from a C compiler since day 1.