[Haskell-cafe] IDE?

Claus Reinke claus.reinke at talk21.com
Sat Jun 16 08:35:17 EDT 2007


> Sorry I should have mentioned that I actually did all those searches you
> provided, and read the wiki. 

ok, then it is a different story, needing different answers:-) in particular,
you have found tools doing all the things you asked for, but they either 
had issues (please report them, to the tool authors/maintainers, or here),
or did not provide some features you need (again, specific questions
might turn up hidden features/tools, or influence further development).
or they have just not been integrated.

> I've tried VIM, Emacs, asked Rhinosoft for an evaluation (which I did not
> get), tried the Eclipse plugin (can't get it to work on 3 PCs I tried),
> tried Visual Haskell (incomplete, sometimes crashes or hangs Visual Studio),
> an briefly looked at other alpha-level solutions. 

yes, that Rhinosoft entry was a surprise, until i noticed the date;), and 
the simple fact that there are so many options, all with their own issues,
pros&cons, can be off-putting. probably best to choose one, and take
it all the way it can go.

here's an idea for an adventurous soul: perhaps someone who hasn't
yet committed to any specific ide/editor could do a survey of available 
haskell development tools (well, okay, at least the editing/ide side of
that), state of the art, pros&cons, selection advice, etc?

> Currently I'm using "Notepad++", which just does basic syntax 
> highlighting but is usable out of the box for a Windows programmer.

that suggests to me that following either the emacs or the vim route
should give you a substantial improvement - the feature equivalent
should work out of the box, and simple addons should cover more
of your feature requests. as others have pointed out, both require
an investment in learning, and using either might be addictive (and
they stay with you into the next great thing/platform/language).

to complement the emacs tour link, and since this question comes
up so often,-) a tour of a few vim features, adapted for haskell:

http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/cr3/toolbox/haskell/Vim/vim.html

> The point I wanted to make is, that I can't find an
> easy-to-install-ready-to-use-and-rock-n-roll IDE for Windows 
> that comes with all or most of those features. 

well, it would be nice to have a standard integrated release of the
major tools, preferable all behind a graphically and ergonomically
well-designed front, but with limited resources and free availability,
functionality comes first (although the Hat folks have tried to collect
and integrate all the various haskell debugging options, for example).

occasionally, there has been talk of a 'haskell cd', where the issue
is not the medium of distribution, but the coordination, testing and
integration of releases for the various tools, libs, and docs. that
hasn't happened yet (it would be a lot of work for someone, and
by the time they finished, development would have moved on), 
but it might still be a worthwhile thing to try, especially given the
growing number of haskell users, tools, and libraries..

as far as gui frontends are concerned, there is an ongoing google
summer of code project; will be interesting to see how far that gets:

http://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2007/04/soc-guihaskell.html

claus



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