[GHC] #15575: Investigate Haskell rewrite of testsuite driver

[GHC]

#15575: Investigate Haskell rewrite of testsuite driver
-------------------------------------+-------------------------------------
           Reporter:  tdammers       |             Owner:  (none)
               Type:  task           |            Status:  new
           Priority:  normal         |         Milestone:  Research needed
          Component:  Test Suite     |           Version:  8.4.3
           Keywords:                 |  Operating System:  Unknown/Multiple
       Architecture:                 |   Type of failure:  None/Unknown
  Unknown/Multiple                   |
          Test Case:                 |        Blocked By:
           Blocking:                 |   Related Tickets:  #15363
Differential Rev(s):                 |         Wiki Page:
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 Currently, the testsuite driver is written in Python. This is a bit of a
 liability:

 - Having to program in "not Haskell" might scare away potential
 contributors here
 - Even developers who are proficient in Python probably prefer working
 with Haskell
 - Managing Python as a dependency poses an additional burden and
 complicates deployment, setting up dev environments, CI, etc.; especially
 on Windows.
 - We miss out on the benefits of type checks and typed programming for a
 substantial bit of infrastructure
 - We miss out on a nice dog-fooding opportunity

 So in order to judge the scope of this task, and define it better, it
 would be good to investigate a bit:

 - What would it take to get high-level feature parity with the current
 solution?
 - Does the Haskell ecosystem cover the concerns that we would like to
 address with existing libraries? (Process management, for example)
 - Can we come up with a smart and frictionless way of migrating all the
 existing test cases in a reliable automated fashion?
 - What are risks and unknowns?

 #15363 is the recent case that sparked this - rather than the proposed
 patch there, which ports existing Haskell code to Python, we would prefer
 going in the other direction.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/15575>
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