Distributing a Haskell program as C source

Question

Say I have a Haskell program or library that I'd like to make accessible to non-Haskellers, potentially C programmers. Can I compile it to C using GHC and then distribute this as a C source?

If this is possible, can someone provide a minimal example? (e.g., a Makefile)

Is it possible to use GHC to automatically determine what compiler flags and headers and needed, and then perhaps bundle this into a single folder?

Basically I'm interested in being able to write portions of programs in C and Haskell, and then distributing it as a tarball, but without requiring the target to have GHC and Cabal installed.

Answer 1

Even if you could, I wouldn't call it "C source". GHC can use C as part of its compilation system, but the generated C code is not even slightly readable. Even if it could be read and understood, it would make no sense to modify it because there is no way (apart from back-porting the changes into Haskell) to incorporate any modifications made by C hackers into future versions of your program.

The term "source" means the code that is written by a human and used to generate the program. In this case that is the Haskell. C generated by a compiler is not "source code", it is an intermediate representation.