Combinators Revisited

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Back in the 80's, one approach to compiling functional programming languages was to compile down to combinators such as SKI. John Hughes' initial work on supercombinators changed the way folks thought about compiling functional languages and caused folks to turn away from this approach by customizing the combinator set to your particular program. Then Lennart Augustsson's work on implementing supercombinators more efficiently sealed the deal. GHC's compilation technique is a descendant of this school of thought.

But what did we give up to get to where we are? Let's explore a bit of alternate history.

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