6.1. Introduction

GHC implements several variants of the Haskell language, along with many extensions. They can all be enabled or disabled by command line flags or LANGUAGE pragmas.

Some of the extensions serve to give you access to the underlying facilities with which we implement Haskell. Thus, you can get at the Raw Iron, if you are willing to write some non-portable code at a more primitive level. You need not be “stuck” on performance because of the implementation costs of Haskell’s “high-level” features—you can always code “under” them. In an extreme case, you can write all your time-critical code in C, and then just glue it together with Haskell!

• 6.1.1. Controlling editions and extensions
• 6.1.2. Overview of all language extensions
• 6.1.3. Summary of stolen syntax