[Haskell-cafe] Integrate GHC-API with Cabal

[Matthew Pickering]

You can implement your tool as a source plugin and then it will work with
any method of building.

On Wed, 25 Jul 2018, 10:34 Félix Baylac, <felix at alternativebit.fr> wrote:

> Dear cafe,
>
> I am currently working on a project [1] which aims to index the code
> published on
> Stackage in order to provide a "code example" database. Basically, for each
> library,  I want to generate a real-world example corpus for each exported
> symbol.
>
> Before generating this database, I need to retrieve the exported symbol of
> a
> package. So far, I have been gathering the dependencies and integrating
> them in
> the GHC pkg database using an external stack call, I then parse the cabal
> file
>  and load the exposed modules using the GHC API and gather the exported
>  symbols*.
>
> It works pretty reliably on the simple packages, however, I end up with
> some
> missing dynamic flags for some more advanced packages (missing c includes,
> c
> libraries, ASM flags, etc.). I then started to parse and load these
> missing
> attributes to GHC until I stepped back for a moment and realized I was
> re-implementing cabal build.
>
> I then looked for a way to "hook" my GHC API code in cabal build. This
> would
> allow cabal to both handle the dependencies gathering as well as setting
> up the
> correct GHC dyn-flags. The only resource I found was [2]. It's really
> clever,
> however, looks a bit hacky to me.
>
> Is there a better way to perform this kind of  "hook"?
>
>
> [1] https://git.alternativebit.fr/NinjaTrappeur/Exhs
> [2]
> http://blog.ezyang.com/2017/02/how-to-integrate-ghc-api-programs-with-cabal/
>
> * I am aware of the hoogle index generated by haddock. However, this index
> is
>   missing when the haddock documentation of a package cannot be generated.
> _______________________________________________
> Haskell-Cafe mailing list
> To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to:
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
> Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20180725/9723a6dd/attachment.html>