Remote GHCi

[Moritz Angermann]

I’m not sure how much I can actually contribute to this, but I’ll just add a
few pointers to nothing gets lost.  I’m not very familiar with remote ghci, but I
think that there is some overlap between remote ghci and out of process template
haskell compilation[1][2].  Most of ghcjs’s TH code is in src/Gen2/TH.hs.

To be honest, I haven’t had much time last year to do anything for the out of
process th stuff.  I’m planing to get back at oopth, once we got shaking-up-ghc[3]
to build cross compilers properly. From the looks of it, that could be soon :)

I only know about the ghcjs repl[4] through twitter. I’m certain luite can share a
lot more here.

With respect to remote ghci, I haven’t had much time to look into it. The main focus
of out of process th (for me) was getting TH to work for cross compiler, which means
shipping code to a remote process through some kind of channel that the remote allows*.

Hope this might help in some way.

Cheers,
Moritz

[1]: https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs/wiki/Porting-GHCJS-Template-Haskell-to-GHC
[2]: https://github.com/angerman/oopth
[3]: https://github.com/snowleopard/shaking-up-ghc
[4]: https://twitter.com/acid2/status/614076905990582272/photo/1
[*]: E.g. getting this to work for iOS. 

> On Jan 8, 2016, at 2:01 PM, Edward Z. Yang <ezyang at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> I was reviewing some history here, and I realized
> that the GHCJS folks had previous implemented this:
> 
> https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-November/010478.html
> 
> What ever happened to this line of work?  Does remote GHCi
> subsume it?
> 
> Edward
> 
> Excerpts from Simon Marlow's message of 2015-11-17 02:10:55 -0800:
>> Hi folks - I've been thinking about changing the way we run interpreted 
>> code so that it would be run in a separate process.  It turns out this 
>> has quite a few benefits, and would let us kill some of the really 
>> awkward hacks we have in GHC to work around problems that arise because 
>> we're running interpreted code and the compiler on the same runtime.
>> 
>> I summarised the idea here: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/RemoteGHCi
>> 
>> I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any thoughts around this, 
>> particularly if doing this would make your life difficult in some way. 
>> Are people relying on dynCompileExpr for anything?
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Simon