A while ago I was wondering how I could enhance EclipseFP, regarding things like memory usage, support for multi components projects, etc. I now have a working version for adventurous testers!
The main thing is the removal of Scion. EclipseFP now uses another backend component called "buildwrapper". There is no server, buildwrapper is only an executable that can be launched with flags, and writes a JSON result on the standard output. This means no more huge memory usage, and less synchronization headaches.
Buildwrapper uses a copy of the project inside a hidden folder. This means that when we want to get say build errors on a dirty editor content, we can write the dirty content to the file inside the hidden folder, and launch a build process on these files, thus avoiding the limitations that the GHC API has on building from a StringBuffer (doesn't work for files requiring preprocessing, etc).
We only use the GHC API to get the types of things in a source file, but we use Cabal to build the project. Buildwrapper actually launches the cabal executable and parses the results. I know, sounds crude compare to an API only approach, but I have the feeling it just works better. Basically the IDE will now behave a lot close to what you get if you were building your project from the command line. And then you get additional goodies, like multi component support (so you can have the executable of your project reference the library in the same project, and it works!).
Buildwrapper uses haskell-src-exts for outline. I've actually seen cases where it needed language pragmas to parse correctly that GHC didn't need, but such is life.
Performance seems to be quite good, except for things that use the GHC API, where there's a little lag. Hopefully the fact that we don't use gigs of memory any more will make up for it.
I'm also thinking about distribution. EclipseFP came with Scion and Scion-browser bundled, if only because we used a different version of scion than the one on Hackage. I think that moving forward we'll rely on cabal install and Haskage. I'm going to add a simple interface to run cabal install inside EclipseFP, so you shouldn't have to go outside to install a package. So the EclipseFP preferences will just ask the user for the path to the buildwrapper and scion-browser executables, with an option to install them from hackage.
If people want to start testing, just go on github, and grab the BuildWrapper repository (main branch) and the EclipseFP project (buildwrapper branch). For the moment, BuildWrapper probably only builds on GHC 7.0. Once I have the feeling it's robust enough and there's no big flaw in the new architecture, I can work on enhancing portability.
2 comments:
EcliseFP with scion doesn't work on a fresh Ubuntu, so I thought I'd try this backend. I build and installed buildwrapper, but sadly, I don't know what to do once I cloned eclisefp. I can't seem to see a README or INSTALL file, and I'm really not familiar with eclipse, so I'm lost
See http://eclipsefp.github.com/dev.html for some instructions on getting EclipseFP to run from sources. Replace anything that mentions Scion by Buildwrapper. Once you have EclipseFP started with buildwrapper, just hack away at a Haskell project!
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