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Is it possible to do cross-compilation with the Glasgow Haskell Compiler for common architectures?
If not, is this feature planned to be developed in the near future?
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GCC, a free software collection of compilers, can be set up to cross compile. It supports many platforms and languages. Cross-compiling GCC requires that a portion of the target platform's C standard library be available on the host platform.
Save this answer. Install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi and binutils-arm-linux-gnueabi packages, and then just use arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc instead of gcc for compilation. This brings in the complete cross-compile environment, including binutils. On Ubuntu 13.10 you get gcc-4.7 for 'gnueabi' and gcc-4.8 for 'gnueabihf'.
Cross-compilation is the act of compiling code for one computer system (often known as the target) on a different system, called the host. It's a very useful technique, for instance when the target system is too small to host the compiler and all relevant files.
"building a cross-compiler is significantly harder than building a compiler that targets the platform it runs on." The problem exists due to the way libraries are built and accessed. In the normal situation all the libraries are located in a specific spot, and are used by all apps on that system.
As of this moment (GHC 7.0) GHC does not support cross-compilation.
As of 2013, "support for cross-compilation works reasonably well in GHC 7.8.1".
See the status on the CrossCompilation wiki page.
Discussion
GHC has always supported self-cross-compilation (i.e. you can port GHC to a new architecture). However, GHC as a cross-compiler, that runs on a host, but produces binaries that target another, has not been supported.
As of GHC 7 though, with the new LLVM backend, work is being undertaken to add cross-compilation support. Status appears to be, from Mark Lentczner, "At this point I can build and link and run a stage1 cross-compiler." So stay tuned for GHC 7.2
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