
#15575: Investigate Haskell rewrite of testsuite driver -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: tdammers | Owner: (none) Type: task | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Research needed Component: Test Suite | Version: 8.4.3 Keywords: | Operating System: Unknown/Multiple Architecture: | Type of failure: None/Unknown Unknown/Multiple | Test Case: | Blocked By: Blocking: | Related Tickets: #15363 Differential Rev(s): | Wiki Page: -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Currently, the testsuite driver is written in Python. This is a bit of a liability: - Having to program in "not Haskell" might scare away potential contributors here - Even developers who are proficient in Python probably prefer working with Haskell - Managing Python as a dependency poses an additional burden and complicates deployment, setting up dev environments, CI, etc.; especially on Windows. - We miss out on the benefits of type checks and typed programming for a substantial bit of infrastructure - We miss out on a nice dog-fooding opportunity So in order to judge the scope of this task, and define it better, it would be good to investigate a bit: - What would it take to get high-level feature parity with the current solution? - Does the Haskell ecosystem cover the concerns that we would like to address with existing libraries? (Process management, for example) - Can we come up with a smart and frictionless way of migrating all the existing test cases in a reliable automated fashion? - What are risks and unknowns? #15363 is the recent case that sparked this - rather than the proposed patch there, which ports existing Haskell code to Python, we would prefer going in the other direction. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/15575 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler