Friday, September 19, 2014

A new Haskell IDE!

Well, that title is click-bait. It's only a proof of concept, so far (-:, sorry!

I wanted to play with Threepenny-GUI since it allowed to do UI the FRP way, without having the troubles of getting a proper UI library to work. And I was going through a period of frustration with EclipseFP, so I thought about something else for a while... It's got the romantic name of HWIDE!

So in fact, this is a very simple integration of CodeMirror and Threepenny-GUI, to be able to edit Haskell sources inside your browser. When you save your buffer, the data is written to disk, and if a cabal file could be found for that source file, a cabal build (in a sandbox) is attempted (with a configure if needed). The output is then parsed by code ripped off BuildWrapper, and the errors/warnings are displayed, so you can click on them and see the offending line in the code.

That's all, really, and even that is not 100% perfect, but it's a start. I could get to play a bit with Events and Behaviors, develop some little widgets. If some FRP experts want to have a look at the code and offer some advice, I'd be all ears!

I probably won't have much time to turn this into the next generation Haskell IDE, but please fork and hack to your heart's content! The repository is at https://github.com/JPMoresmau/dbIDE.

Happy Haskell Hacking!

No comments: