[Haskell] Haskell support for the Eclipse IDE 0.1 (alpha)

[Leif Frenzel]

Dear Haskellers,

I am building a set of tools for the Eclipse IDE that extend it with support
for Haskell development. I have put a first running version of these tools
on the web for anybody who may be interested in playing around with it.

(Eclipse is an open source project building a modular, extensible platform
for application development, with the meanwhile very popular Java IDE as its
flagship: see http://eclipse.org .)

The whole thing is just a start and probably buggy, so it's at best an
alpha, but at least I managed to get through the complete development
cycle with some simple programs :-) I hope it will give an impression how an
Eclipse-based Haskell IDE might look like one day ...

Instructions for downloading and installing can be found here:

http://leiffrenzel.de/eclipse/install.html

(Installation using the built-in update manager in Eclipse.)


Requirements:

- Java 1.4.1 or higher
- Eclipse 3.0 (Milestone 6 or 7)
- OS: I have test-run it on Win2k and SuSE Linux 9.0, other Win32s and
Linuxs will probably work as well
(any other OS: no idea ... but if anyone tries, I would be very interested
to hear about your experiences)


Currently the following features are included:

- a Haskell development perspective
- a configurable project wizard for a Haskell project structure
- a source code editor with Haskell-specific syntax coloring and some
rudimentary context-sensitive code completion
- a Haskell project nature with incremental builder
- a compiler support infrastructure that will allow the integration of
different compilers
- ghc support
- compiler messages integrated in the standard Eclipse views
- launching for compiled & linked files from within the IDE
- some minimal 'Getting started' docs

My focus for the next time will be on:

- further extending the compiler/launcher framework to support interactive
environments (HUGS, ghci)
- improve compiler support (configuration for compiler options)
- enhance the builder (above all: reduce compiler invocations)
- more UI

Any feedback would be very welcome.

Ciao,
Leif