#15461: Machine accessible interface to GHCi -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: bgamari | Owner: (none) Type: feature | Status: new request | Priority: normal | Milestone: 8.6.1 Component: GHCi | Version: 8.4.3 Keywords: newcomer | Operating System: Unknown/Multiple Architecture: | Type of failure: None/Unknown Unknown/Multiple | Test Case: | Blocked By: Blocking: | Related Tickets: Differential Rev(s): | Wiki Page: -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- For a long time tooling users (e.g. `haskell-mode`) have been treating GHCi as a language server. As one would expect this leads to a frustrating situation for both GHC developers (who feel constrained in their ability to change output) and users (who occasionally suffer breakage, e.g. [[https://github.com/haskell/haskell- mode/issues/1553#issuecomment-409267399]]). Ultimately the solution seems fairly clear: 1. allow GHCi to expose multiple REPL interfaces (e.g. such that a user could have multiple textual REPLs open, all served by the same GHCi session) 2. add a machine-readable request protocol to GHCi, giving tooling users a way to use GHCi's functionality without parsing human-readable output (1) should be fairly straightforward to implement. (2) on the other hand requires some design work (e.g. what does the wire protocol look like?) and a fair bit of refactoring (to expose the existing commands in a machine-readable manner). -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/15461 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler