GHC originally begun in 1989 as a prototype, written in Lazy ML (LML) by Kevin Hammond at the University of Glasgow.

Later that year, the prototype was completely rewritten in Haskell, except for its parser, by Cordelia Hall, Will Partain, and Simon Peyton Jones.

[2] Peyton Jones, and Marlow, later moved to Microsoft Research in Cambridge, where they continued to be primarily responsible for developing GHC.

GHC's front end, incorporating the lexer, parser and typechecker, is designed to preserve as much information about the source language as possible until after type inference is complete, toward the goal of providing clear error messages to users.

[14] The back end of the compiler transforms Core code into an internal representation of C--, via an intermediate language STG (short for "Spineless Tagless G-machine").

In all three cases, the resultant native code is finally linked against the GHC runtime system to produce an executable.

There is an ongoing effort[18] to describe extensions and select those which will be included in future versions of the language specification.