[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: GHC survey results

[John Meacham]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 01:27:39PM +0100, Thomas Davie wrote:
> On 28 Jun 2005, at 10:58, Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
> >We've finally digested the results of the GHC survey, and you can find
> >our analysis here:
> >
> >  http://www.haskell.org/ghc/survey2005-summary.html
> >
> >There's a lot to take in, but it's an interesting read.  Enjoy!
> I feel compelled to point out that for all those people wanting a  
> debugger, Hat is there, it's under active development, and it isn't  
> going away for a while.  It even sports a forward tracer as people  
> seem to want (hat-anim).
> 
> http://www.haskell.org/hat

Unfortunatly hat suffers from the same problem that pretty much every
non-trivial preprocessor does, as soon as you start using ghc's special
or experimental features that have not been added to hat yet, they stop
working. Big complicated programs tend to be the ones you want to debug
and also are the ones where you most likely needed to use a new
extension... I am not sure what the general solution would be. perhaps
hat being integrated with ghc? or better yet would be a standard
interface for ghc to call a preprocessor but at some intermediate level
where most of the extensions have been sugared away but most of the
original source structure still exists... the nice thing about a
standard interface would be that jhc and other compilers could support
it too. It wouldn't even need to be a plugin based thing, but rather an
executable that ghc can run and pass commands to it on stdin and read
results on stdout. Being able to just work on any unmodified program the
compiler supports is a huge feature. 

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈