Build GHC with stack and hadrian

By far the easiest way I know of to get a build of GHC is via the tools 'stack' and 'hadrian'*. The procedures below set out commands that I know first hand work** with machines provisioned by the CI systems Azure, Travis and Appveyor.

Setup

• Ubuntu:

  curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh
  stack setup
  

• macOS:

  /usr/bin/ruby -e \
    "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
  brew install autoconf automake gmp
  curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh
  stack setup
  

• Windows:

  curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh
  stack setup
  stack exec -- pacman -S autoconf automake-wrapper make patch python tar \
        --noconfirm
  

Build

• Ubuntu & macOS:

  git clone --recursive https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc.git
  cd ghc
  hadrian/build.stack.sh --configure --flavour=quickest -j
  

• Windows:

  git clone --recursive https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc.git
  cd ghc
  hadrian/build.stack.bat --configure --flavour=quickest -j
  

---

[*] The simplicitly and uniformity of these commands make me an advocate of these tools and in particular, the hadrian --configure flag.

[**] Well, that is to say mostly work. The above is the ideal and has worked me for me reliably for the last year. Recently though, for one reason or another, there seem to have been a lot of breakages. Your mileage may vary.