[Haskell-cafe] "Standardising" Haskell AST for tooling

[Alan & Kim Zimmerman]

Hi all

I am looking at updating HaRe for GHC 7.8.3, and I am fighting my way
through the AST changes.

One of the things I have had at the back of my mind for a while is to use
something like Kure universes or more generally lens to provide a set of
isomorphisms from the various flavours of AST into some kind of
standardised internal representation, allowing easier tool manipulation.

This could potentially decouple the tools from the specific
compiler/analyzer, so they could work across GHC 7.6.x, GHC 7.8.x,
haskell-src-exts, haste, etc..

Obviously there would be limitations to this where an advance in the
language brings in new features, but a lot of useful tool work can be done
that does not touch the new stuff.

I don't know if anything similar is planned in either ghc-server or another
toolchain.

My haskell-token-utils is a first limited attempt to bring source code
round tripping to a variety of backends, but a more general solution to the
AST phase would help tooling in general

So, is this worth doing? Is it being done already, or planned?


Regards
  Alan
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