Release/git plans

[Max Bolingbroke]

On 21 January 2011 23:59, austin seipp <as at hacks.yi.org> wrote:
> Perhaps Max can
> elaborate on why this design was rejected in favor of the current one,
> so we can see how and where it falls down, and what we really want.

The only reason really is that it added a lot of mechanism. From the
top of my head:
 * Parsing etc for PHASE pragmas that declared phase objects
 * A new namespace for phases
 * Stuff to gather declared phases from all imported modules during compilation
 * A built-in phase for each core pass
 * A solver that ordered core passes and plugin passes according to the phases

So it was a lot of trouble for relatively little gain. In an effort to
keep the delta against GHC small I threw it out in favour of the much,
much simpler design we have today.

> Thomas pointed out the Scala compiler plugin design document, so I'll
> be sure to read over it this weekend when I get the chance to cook up
> ideas.

The Scala plugins project was just starting when I was working on GHC
plugins so there was no design doc I could refer to at that time.
Shame :-(

Thanks for taking the lead on resurrecting plugins, Austin!

Cheers,
Max