To answer my own question with a solution and another question: Sam Halliday writes:
I'm mostly interested in gathering information about symbols and their type signatures. As a first exercise: given a module+import section for a haskell source file, I want to find out which symbols (and their types) are available. Like :browse in ghci, but programmatically.
This is answered by Stephen Diehl's blog post on the ghc api! How lucky I am: http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/ghc_01.html He points to getNamesInScope Unfortunately I'm getting zero Names back when loading a file that imports several modules from ghc. Is there something I'm missing in the following? module Main where import Control.Monad import Control.Monad.IO.Class import GHC import GHC.Paths (libdir) main = runGhc (Just libdir) $ do dflags <- getSessionDynFlags void $ setSessionDynFlags $ dflags { hscTarget = HscInterpreted , ghcLink = LinkInMemory } addTarget $ Target (TargetFile "exe/Main.hs" Nothing) False Nothing res <- load LoadAllTargets liftIO $ putStrLn $ showPpr dflags res names <- getNamesInScope liftIO $ putStrLn $ "seen " <> (show $ length names) <> " Names" -- Best regards, Sam