Making GHCi awesomer?

[Daniel Gröber]

From: Christopher Done <chrisdone at gmail.com>
Subject: Making GHCi awesomer?
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 17:48:48 +0200

>    1. The first problem with this is that every three projects will
>    segfault or panic when trying to load in a project that GHCi will
>    load in happily. [...] People have similar complaints of GHC Mod
>    & co. “Getting it to work” is a deterrant.

Do you have any examples of such projects, I've never seen any
complaints about ghc-mod doing this.

> So, of course, this got me thinking that I could instead make
> ghc-server be based off of GHCi’s actual codebase. I could rebase upon
> the latest GHC release and maintain 2-3 GHC versions backwards. That’s
> certainly doable, it would essentially give me “GHCi++”. Good for me,
> I just piggy back on the GHCi goodness and then use the GHC API for
> additional things as I’m doing now.

I had that idea too for ghc-mod unfortunately it's not so easy as
ghci's internal API mostly consists of functions that only have side
effects (i.e. don't return anything you can process further) :/

> But is there a way I can get any of this into the official repo? For
> example, could I hack on this (perhaps with Herbert) as “ghci-ng”,
> provide an alternative JSON communication layer (e.g. via some
> ―use-json flag) and and socket listener (―listen-on ), a way
> to distinguish stdout/stderr (possibly by forking a process, unsure at
> this stage), and then any of the above features (point 4) listed. I
> make sure that I’m rebasing upon HEAD, as if to say ghci-ng is a kind
> of submodule, and then when release time comes we merge back in any
> new stuff since the last release. Early adopters can use
> ghci-ng, and everyone benefits from official GHC releases.
>
> The only snag there is that, personally speaking, it would be better
> if ghci-ng would compile on older GHC versions. So if GHC 7.10 is the
> latest release, it would still be nice (and it *seems* pretty
> feasible) that GHC 7.8 users could still cabal install it without
> issue. People shouldn’t have to wait if they don’t have to.

Sounds awesome I'd love to get in on this :)

--Daniel
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