[Haskell-cafe] ANN: exference: a different djinn

[lennart spitzner]

On 26/04/15 19:38, Andrew Gibiansky wrote:
> Could this somehow be used with the GHC API, so that it could be embedded
> as autocomplete in an interpreter / code editor?
> 
> I am imagining using this with GHC 7.10 Type Holes in IHaskell. To
> autocomplete, you'd insert a hole ("_"), GHC would be able to tell you the
> type of the hole, you'd be able to pass it to exference, and then your
> autocomplete suggestions would be full expressions. Does this sound
> plausible?

This certainly counts as a long-term goal for Exference. As it stands,
there are two issues:
a) ideally, Exference would take into account all locally defined (or
even all visible) functions. This is problematic, as one generally has
to be careful adding too many / the wrong functions to the environment
because it can blow up the search space. There might be some
heuristics to determine what can safely be added; alternatively the
user could selectively add functions.
b) performance in general is not as good as i would like, both memory
and run-time. (to give you an idea: running my test-cases needs
something in the range of 3GB memory, the default even is at -M4G.)
There certainly is room for optimizations; also i have not really
tested what types of queries can be solved when you give tight limits
to memory/run-time.

Lennart