HIE Files

[Gershom B]

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 9:30 AM, Simon Peyton Jones
<simonpj at microsoft.com> wrote:

>
> Why not put the .hie-file info into the .hi file?  (Optionally, of course.)
>

Simon, I'm curious what benefits you think we might get from this?
(I'm one of the mentors on this GSoC project btw).

> What tools/libraries do you plan to produce to allow clients to read a .hie file and make send of the contents?

For GSoC as a proof of concept the idea is to teach haddock's
hyperlinked-source backend to use this information to add
type-annotation-on-hover to the colorized, hyperlinked, html source.

I think what is anticipated more broadly is that other tools like the
Haskell IDE Engine (which Zubin has contributed to in the past) will
also be able to make use of these files to provide ide and tooling
features in a more lightweight way than needing to directly interface
with the GHC API. (This by the way is one of the key benefits of
keeping the file separate from standard hi files -- it should be
parseable and consumable without needing to link in GHC).

-g