[Haskell-cafe] haskell-ide-engine versus hsdev (and Debuggers)

[Daniel Gröber]

Hi,

On Sun, Jun 05, 2016 at 01:35:49PM -0400, Leonard Janke wrote:
> I am new to Haskell and thinking of contributing to the IDE efforts. I've
> noticed two projects which aim to provide a "service" that editors and IDEs
> can call to help present useful information to programmers. I am wondering
> how these projects differ and why they are separate efforts since they seem
> to have very similar end goals?

I think the differentiating factor is haskell-ide-engine is a very
collaborative project with a lot more contributors than hsdev, which
is pretty much a one-man show.

Having worked in the Haskell developer tooling space for quite a while
now I have to say I never really saw any official announcement of the
hsdev project I just sort of stumbled upon it when I noticed it was
using my project (ghc-mod). Haskell-ide-engine on the other hand was
officially announced and discussed publicly quite a bit.

> Another thing that I am wondering is if either of these two projects aims
> to provide debugger support and what the general state of debuggers for
> Haskell is? I've seen a project for a Haskell remote debugger which looks
> it was ghci/interpreter based and was being used by Eclipse and IntelliJ.
> It didn't work when I tried it, however, and I am not sure that the project
> is still active. It also looks like ghc only recently began adding support
> for debugging compiled Haskell and that initial efforts may be to get
> things working with gdb or lldb. Am I correctly understanding the current
> landscape as far as Haskell debuggers go?

I think debugger support pretty much has to come from GHC there isn't
all that much an external project can do other than pass through
whatever GHC provides to the IDE but I'm not too familliar with the
debug support that does exist.

--Daniel
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