
1) is there a single place/wiki/ticket that collects all the deficiencies of ghci, compared to ghc? things like: a) which platforms have ghc, but not ghci b) which features are available in ghc, but not in ghci c) does ghci encounter bugs where ghc would succeed d) which of these deficiencies are temporary, which are likely to stay 2) given that ghci is ghc --interactive, why are there any cases of b/c above at all? wouldn't it be possible for ghci to try its stuff, but to fall back to ghc only for those modules which it can't handle from source itself (yet)? - we can do ghc --make; ghci, to get around issues - we can do ghci -fforce-recomp, to get to sources but those two are rather coarse-grained, and require too much manual tweaking to get the effect of creating a ghci session with as many modules from source as possible, and all others from object files. 3) suggestions: a) could we have a :make command in ghci that does a 'ghc --make' while reusing the information from the current session? b) could we have a --prefer-source option for ghci, so that 'ghc --make; ghci --prefer-source' will try to load all modules from source, but will fall back to the existing object files if necessary (instead of failing, as -fforce-recomp does)? c) allow selective switching between source and object files loaded into ghci (:prefer source M,N,..; :prefer object O,P,Q,..). the application i have in mind is trying to use ghci on non-trivial projects, such as darcs, or even ghc itself: - it isn't possible to load all sources into ghci - loading all object files is possible, but prevents use of ghci features such as ':m *Module', ':browse *Module', breakpoints, tags, .. - ghci -fforce-recomp fails because it applies to all modules - there is substantial setup to do before one can call ghc or ghci, so dropping out of a session and trying to figure out dependencies and flags for compiling individual modules by hand isn't practical - there is often a configurable makefile, so that one can use the same setup for calling either 'ghc --make' or 'ghc --interactive'; but, within the latter, one cannot simply switch to full :make or to selective --prefer-source, without losing the setup ideally, ghci would simply work whereever ghc works, and would provide its additional features for as many modules as it can. but in the interim, having 3a and especially 3b would help me a lot. 3c would also be nice, too, but not as urgent as 3b. i find it sad that, currently, there is this gap that doesn't allow me to make full use of ghci's features for larger projects such as darcs or ghc. is hoping for 3b realistic? claus