GHC as a package

[Simon Marlow]

On 08 February 2005 12:43, Lennart Kolmodin wrote:

> I'm working on an IDE for Haskell, written in Haskell.
> Currently, I'm looking for a way to parse .hs-files for a module
> browser and I recall that Simon Marlow was going to release GHC as a
> package "soon".
> We could also use that package to compile source code without
> invoking ghc as a separate process.
> 
> What is the status of the package and where can I get it?
> I can't find it in the CVS or in any of the snapshots.

You can currently compile GHC as a package, but the part that is missing
is a well-thought-out API to access the facilities of GHC.  We'd like to
do this, and indeed it will probably emerge as part of the work we're
doing on a Visual Studio plug-in, but currently other things have higher
priority.  We plan to get back to work on Visual Studio during March.

To compile GHC as a package, get a recent GHC source tree and set
'BuildPackageGHC=YES' in your mk/build.mk.  You should also set
$(GHC_PKG) to point to your ghc-pkg command.  Then build ghc as normal,
and in ghc/compiler say 'make install-inplace-pkg' to register the
package (this won't do any actual installation, just register the
package with your installed GHC).

Cheers,
	Simon