[Haskell-cafe] Re: GHC API GSoc project

Claus, thanks for taking the time to articulate all this, speaking as the mentor for the project this material is invaluable. I'd particularly like to see a wiki page collecting issues, plans and priorities too. My own priority is to have the compilation phases exposed. One (selfish) reason for this is that it will force a number of refactorings and cleanups inside GHC, that we've had on the radar for some time. As soon as there's a wiki page up I can start downloading some of the contents of my whiteboard onto it :-) Keeping track of comments in the parser sounds like a high priority to me, because we have an active customer (Haddock) to drive the design and test it. Another active customer is Yi, as I understand it they are using the GHC API to provide the features we had in Visual Haskell. This will be useful for driving the aspects of the design that IDEs need. Cheers, Simon Claus Reinke wrote:

thanks, I was wondering about your project. Is there a project page documenting the issues/tickets you look at, and particularly the plan of attack as it changes in the face of reality?-) I've found

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/haskell/appinfo.html?csaid=4189AF2C8AE5E25A

which covers a lot of ground, and some interesting issues, but is so general (and design- rather than application-driven) that I've been worried about how much of it you'll manage (and with which priorities), given that the GHC API is indeed exposed rather than designed and may thus interfere with your good intentions in unexpected ways.

Also, there are very different user needs out there, some want just analysis or some information extraction, some want source transformation capabilities, some want a stable portable hs-plugins replacement, some want to work with backends, etc. . you can't please everyone, but until your focus is known, people can't easily complain about your priorities.

IMHO, trying to support a semantics- and comment-preserving roundtrip in (pretty . parse) would be a good way to start (David says he's going to look at the extracting comments/pragmas part, but they still need to be put back in during pretty printing). It sounds simple, and if it is, it will enable a lot more usage of the GHC API; and if it turns out not to be simple, you'll have a first sign of what you're up against, and can adjust your expectations!-)

Making yourself available as you've done here "I'm here; I'm going to work on this now; please cc me if you want to express your priorities" sounds like a good way to pull together the many strands of interests relating to the GHC API. Now we all have to dust off our old "wouldn't it be nice if the API could do this and that"s.

Perhaps something similar to what the type family folks are doing would help: use the ticket tracker for individual issues, have test cases that demonstrate the issues and their resolution, have more detailed documents online elsewhere, and a single wiki page to tie everything together (making it easier to find relevant tickets and the state of the art).

[cf http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/TypeFunctionsStatus ]

over the years, quite a few issues have been raised as tickets/ email/source comments, so collecting them would be a good way to get an idea of what is needed, deciding which of those issues would take how much effort would be a first useful contribution, and seeing which of these you intend to tackle would give the community at large a better chance to comment on your priorities in relation to their needs.

I also hope you are in touch with Chaddaï - the port of HaRe to the GHC API did not make it as a GSoC project, but I understand he is going to do some work in this direction anyway.

Looking forward to an improved GHC API!-) Claus

ps. here are some first entries for your list, and for other interested parties following along (I'd be very interested to hear about your progress):

- http://code.google.com/soc/2008/haskell/appinfo.html?csaid=4189AF2C8AE5E25A (project outline)

- http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1467 (GHC API: expose separate compilation stages; your main ticket so far?)

- concerning exposed phases, it would also be useful if the interface was more uniform (eg., AST, typed AST,..)

- search for NOTE in ghc/compiler/main/GHC.hs for some related notes from an earlier GHC/HaRe meeting

- is it possible to use standalone deriving to get a generic programming framework over the ASTs without blowing up GHC's code for its own use (deriving Data, etc.)?

- http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-May/042616.html (GHC API: how to get the typechecked AST?)

- http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1886 (GHC API should preserve and provide access to comments)

- dynamic loading of Haskell code, ala hs-plugins, but without the version/platform issues (GHCi has to be able to do this anyway, but it would be nice to have the ugly bits hidden, such as unsafeCast#, or whatever it was). that might require a standard for typeReps, if I recall correctly..

- is there a way to reduce version-skew for clients of the GHC API (currently, there is no stability guaranteed at all, so if you don't want to live with lots of #ifdefs and breakage, you keep delaying your fantastic GHC API-base projects "until the dust settles")

- I'm sure there have been many more, but that's the problem: not all these issues have been collected as they were raised; even if you don't tackle all of them, it would be nice if you could collect all of them

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On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Claus Reinke wrote:

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Ah, I didn't think about the GHC options that change the lexical syntax. You're right, using the GHC lexer should be easier.

and, if you do that, you could also make the GHC lexer squirrel away the comments (including pragmas, if they aren't already in the AST) someplace safe, indexed by, or at least annotated with, their source locations, and make this comment/ pragma storage available via the GHC API. (1a)

then, we'd need a way to merge those comments and pragmas back into the output during pretty printing, and we'd have made the first small step towards source-to-source transformations: making code survive semantically intact over (pretty . parse). (1b)

that would still not quite fullfill the GHC API comment ticket (*), but that was only a quick sketch, not a definite design. it might be sufficient to let each GHC API client do its own search to associate bits of comment/pragma storage with bits of AST. if i understand you correctly, you are going to do (1a), so if you could add that to the GHC API, we'd only need (1b) to go from useable-for-analysis-and-extraction to useable-for-transformation.

is that going to be a problem?

claus

(*) knowing the source location of some piece of AST is not sufficient for figuring out whether it has any immediately preceding or following comments (there might be other AST fragments in between, closer to the next comment). but, if one knows the nearest comment segment for each piece of AST, one could then build a map where the closest AST pieces are mapped to (Just commentID), and the other AST pieces are mapped to Nothing.

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