Cabal repl is absolutely great! Are there any reasons why it couldn't provide all information that ghc-mod and hdevtools do? It could be run as a background process, right? It knows about sandboxes as well.

That would be a great SoC project - extend cabal repls to subsume ghc-mod and hdevtools.

Michal

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 4:59 PM, Andrey Chudnov <achudnov@gmail.com> wrote:

While I do not condone Mr. Verdi's verbal bashing of the efforts of the Haskell community to provide development tools, I do feel his pain. There is quite a bit of divided effort which seems to result in having multiple inferior solutions.

My all-time favorite is ghc-mod because "it just works", but it can be very slow for large projects, especially involving template-haskell (and there are no easy fixes for that).

HDevTools, in theory, is great: a persistent server, allowing incremental builds/checks etc., but it's oblivious to .cabal files, let alone sandboxes, which makes it completely impractical for any degree of serious Haskell development (on that note, how come pull request 30 [1] is still open?! /rant).

Finally, GHCi is supposed to be enough for IDE support in editors. However, as I understand it, the problem is that its output is not easily parsed and, hence, consumed by editors; on top of that, using it with .cabal files and sandboxes requires calling 'cabal repl', so using another tool.

So, maybe, GHCi could be augmented with an easily consumed output format (like JSON), and 'cabal' be given support for that mode as well? Since it's that time of the year again (I mean, the GSoC proposal time :)), maybe, someone would look into this idea?

[1] https://github.com/bitc/hdevtools/pull/30

/Andrey

On 03/10/2014 03:44 PM, Vagif Verdi wrote:
Sorry, i meant ghci not cabal.

As for hsdev, in order to provide its features it will have to load and keep track of entire project information which is already done by ghc-mod and hdevtools separately. So you ushould see how much effort is wasted on doing the same thing again and again in each of 4 different tools (ghci, ghc-mod, hdevtools and hsdev)

On Monday, March 10, 2014 12:32:25 PM UTC-7, Niklas Hambüchen wrote:
On 10/03/14 18:41, Vagif Verdi wrote:
> This is an excellent illustration of how fragmentation in this specific
> area hurts community. Not only you are forced to use 3 different tools
> (ghc-mod, hdevtools, cabal) each of which basically provides the same
> service but in an incompatible and incomplete way. But you decided to
> create yet another one instead of contributing to the ones you already
> use (they are all open source)

I'm not sure what you mean to say; ghc-mod and cabal certainly do not do
the same. Hsdev doesn't either, and claiming that we don't contribute to
these projects is strange.
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskel...@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe