Recently Alan Zimmerman announced on the haskell-cafe mailing list that there was a new haskell-ide project, with a new Github repository, a mailing list and an IRC channel. Some people have been concerned that

this effort is fragmenting existing efforts, including with

ide-backend (the open sourced library FP Complete announced earlier

this year). I clarified this on Reddit, but wanted to take the

opportunity to do so on this blog as well (and, additionally, throw

some extra attention on the haskell-ide project).

Alan's announcement did not come in a vacuum; about two weeks ago, he reached out to others for feedback on a potential project.

There were some side channel discussions that I was involved in,

all of which were very much in favor of (and excited about!) this

project. To quote myself from Reddit, we reached the following

conclusion:

Both the ghc-mod and ide-backend maintainers have agreed to

contribute code to this new repository and then rebase the old

repos on this. The reason we're using a new repo instead of

modifying one of the existing ones is so that the existing projects

experience no disruption during this migration process. If this was

a new set of people starting a new project without support from

existing projects, I'd agree with you. But Alan's reached out to

existing players already, which is an important distinction.

Michael Sloan - the current maintainer of ide-backend and one of

the primary developers of both School of Haskell and FP Haskell

Center - is already getting involved in this project. It's too

early to decide exactly what the future of ide-backend will be

relative to haskell-ide, but we're not ruling anything out.

Anything from rebasing ide-backend to use haskell-ide internally,

all the way to deprecating ide-backend in favor of haskell-ide, is

on the table. We'll do whatever makes the most sense to help the

Haskell community create great tooling.

Related to this project: a number of people have been following

the development of stack-ide. We started that project not realizing

how quickly existing tooling (like ghc-mod and hdevtools) would

adopt support for Stack, and certainly not expecting this new

haskell-ide project to offer a unifying force in the Haskell

tooling space. To avoid fragmentation, we're currently holding off

on further word on stack-ide, hoping instead that collaboration

will help improve existing tooling not just for the Stack use case,

but for cabal, cabal sandboxes, and other cases people have been

targeting.

Since I'm already discussing IDE stuff, let me publicly give an

answer I've given privately to a few people. A number of

individuals have asked about the future of the FP Haskell Center

codebase, and the possibility of open sourcing it. The summary

answer is:

• Everything related to School of Haskell is being open sourced.

  Most of that is done already, the rest is just in the last few

  stages of code cleanup.

• The current state of the FP Haskell Center code base is

  difficult to simply give out, since it's based on some superseded

  technologies. For example, we created it in a world where Docker

  didn't exist, and have quite a few LXC scripts to make it work. We

  also have some difficult-to-manage build scripts that could be

  replaced by Stack. We've cleaned all of this up for School of

  Haskell, but have not done the same to the FP Haskell Center

  codebase.

• As a general policy, we don't like to just drop unsupported

  code on the community at FP Complete. If there are maintainers that

  are interested in taking over the current FPHC codebase, we can

  discuss transferring it over. But simply open sourcing without any

  support tends not to be a helpful move (instead, it distracts from

  other, active projects, which we don't want to do).

• One possibility going forward is that, once the School of

  Haskell web service is up, running, and stable, a new IDE project

  could be started that targets that same API. We're not planning on

  running such a project at FP Complete, but we'd be happy to provide

  some feedback, and include necessary changes to the SoH service to

  make it work.

I hope this excites others as much as it excites me: some

concerted efforts on improving tooling can hopefully go a long way.

A big thank you to Alan for coordinating this effort, and to

Michael Sloan for leading the charge from the FP Complete side. I'm

optimistic that we'll see some real strides forward in the near

future.