The Lazy Reader

For people who will not read the manual.

This is a small, illustrated guide to the ideas inside aihc, a Haskell compiler. Each chapter has one idea, one picture, and one playground. The playground is the compiler itself. It runs in your browser.

Chapters

Chapter 1 Hello, compiler Text becomes a tree. Watch the parser work.

Chapter 2 Who is who Every name gets a color. Find out which x is which.

Chapter 3 What is what The compiler guesses the types. It guesses well.

Chapter 4 The honest language System FC, where nothing is implicit. Not written yet.

How to read this guide

You do not need to know Haskell well. You do not need to know how a compiler works. That is the point.

Each chapter ends with a playground. Change the code on the left, and the compiler answers on the right. The compiler is aihc, compiled to WebAssembly by aihc. It needs a recent browser: Chrome, Firefox, or Safari 27.

If you want the long version, the manual has it. This guide has the short version, with pictures.