"Extensible interface files" work and ANN pragmas

[Matthew Pickering]

I also looked at this patch briefly now and it's my understanding that
the intention is to use this for HIE files as well?

HIE files currently serialises Names differently to normal interface
files (to also include the SrcSpan) and it wasn't clear to me that the
current implementation would allow for this.

Zubin/Josh could you please comment?

Otherwise looks like a nice patch.

Cheers,

Matt

On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 8:57 AM Ömer Sinan Ağacan <omeragacan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The "extensible interface files" [1, 2] work has been discussed at GHC calls a
> few times and the conclusion was we were going to document why current
> annotation mechanism (ANN pragmas) are insufficient and we need yet another way
> to put stuff into interfaces.
>
> Unfortunately the MR was merged before that's done and so it's currently
> undocumented and it's still unclear what's insufficient about ANN pragmas or how
> the new mechanism differs.
>
> I'm currently working on an interface files related patch (#16885) so I have to
> maintain both of these features now. It'd be good to know why both is necessary.
> If ANN is no longer useful or needed could we deprecate it in favor of the new
> mechanism and remove it in a few releases? That's help maintaining the code in
> the future.
>
> Could people involved in this design and patch please document the thought
> process here?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ömer
>
> [1]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/2948
> [2]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/Extensible-Interface-Files
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