Discovery of source dependencies without --make

[Thomas Miedema]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 3:41 PM, Lars Hupel <lars at hupel.info> wrote:

> Let's say the hypothetical feature is selected via the GHC flag
> "--topo-sort". It would add a step before regular compilation and
> wouldn't affect any other flag:
>
>   ghc -c --topo-sort fileA.hs fileB.hs ...
>
> This would first read in the specified source files and look at their
> module headers and import statements. It would build a graph of module
> dependencies _between_ the specified source files (ignoring circular
> dependencies), perform a topological sort on that graph, and proceed
> with compiling the source files in that order.
>

GHC 8 will have support for Frontend plugins. Frontend plugins enable you
to write plugins to replace
GHC major modes.

E.g. instead of saying

    ghc --make A B C

you can now say:

    ghc --frontend TopoSort A B C

You still have to implement TopoSort.hs yourself, using the GHC API to
compile A B C in topological order, but some of the plumbing is taken care
of by the Frontend plugin infrastructure already.

Take a look at this commit, especially the user's guide section and the
test case:
https://github.com/ghc/ghc/commit/a3c2a26b3af034f09c960b2dad38f73be7e3a655.
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