OK, I've gone ahead and done this. Edward Excerpts from Edward Z. Yang's message of 2014-05-30 01:55:35 +0100:
Currently, most GHC API tests are not run on 'make fast', ostensibly because linking against the GHC API can take a while. I propose that change this, and run GHC API tests by default. Reasons:
1. The GHC API is closely tied a lot of internal structure of GHC, so it's very easy to make a change, track it through the rest of the compiler, but forget to update the tests/documentation.
2. We can boost this into poor man's testable documentation. The idea is to duplicate all GHC API examples in the manual in the test suite, and have a comment on all of the examples asking the developer to update the manual. (Or we could automatically extract the snippets from the manual, but that's work and this I could do in a few minutes.)
3. I don't think running these tests will add that much extra run time to the test suite; certainly interactively the time spent linking is unnoticeable.
Let's set a one week discussion period for this proposal.
Thanks, Edward