Extracting representation from GHC

[Simon Peyton Jones]

|  To do this, my idea is to instruct GHC with a compilation flag to give
|  out its internal representation of the source code.

Why can't you just use GHC as a library, and ask it to parse and typecheck the module and then look at what it gives you.

Others are more used to the GHC API than me, though.

S

|  -----Original Message-----
|  From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
|  Németh Boldizsár
|  Sent: 19 January 2018 09:35
|  To: ghc-devs at haskell.org
|  Subject: Extracting representation from GHC
|  
|  Dear GHC Developers,
|  
|  I would like to ask your opinion on my ideas to make it easier to use
|  development tools with GHC.
|  
|  In the past when working on a Haskell refactoring tool I relied on
|  using the GHC API for parsing and type checking Haskell sources. I
|  extracted the representation and performed analysis and transformation
|  on it as it was needed. However using the refactorer would be easier
|  if it could work with build tools.
|  
|  To do this, my idea is to instruct GHC with a compilation flag to give
|  out its internal representation of the source code. Most build tools
|  let the user to configure the GHC flags so the refactoring tool would
|  be usable in any build infrastructure. I'm thinking of using the pre-
|  existing plugin architecture and adding two new fields to the Plugin
|  datastructure. One would be called with the parsed representation
|  (HsParsedModule) when parsing succeeds, another with the result of the
|  type checking (TcGblEnv) when type checking is finished.
|  
|  What do you think about this solution?
|  
|  Boldizsár
|  
|  (ps: My first idea was using frontend plugins, but I could not access
|  the representation from there and --frontend flag changed GHC
|  compilation mode.)
|  
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