This project aims to be the universal interface to a growing number of Haskell tools, providing a full-featured and easy to query backend for editors and IDEs that require Haskell-specific functionality.

Planned features:

• Cabal / Stack project configuration and compilation
• Error checking, warnings, linter and dead code detection
• Refactoring tools, code beautification, auto-apply suggestion
• Code generation
• Run testing Suite, check coverage
• Autocompletion
• Get type at point
• Jump to definition, find usages, browse documentation, generate ctags
• REPL

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.

This project is not started from scratch:

1. See why we should supersede previous tools
2. Check the list of existing tools and functionality
3. See more other tools and IDEs for inspiration

❤️ Haskell tooling dream is near, we need your help! ❤️

• Register in our google group mailing list.
• Join our IRC channel at #haskell-ide-engine on freenode.
• Fork this repo and hack as much as you can.
• Ask @alanz or @hvr to join the project.

Apart from stack you need cask for the emacs tests. You can install it using

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cask/cask/master/go | python

Below you find a short overview of the main architectural layers of haskell-ide-engine. For more info have a look in the docs folder at the root of this project, especially:

• The Architecture discussion
• The Protocol discussion
• The Design discussion

ghc-mod stays an AGPL project, and is used for its "awesome sauce" in terms of the BIOS functions that it does so well. This interface is straightforward to use, and if a license-constrained user wants to do something else it is also easy to replace, if there is strong control of the operating environment.

A layer providing a point to integrate tools and existing functions, probably including ghci.

This provides a set of logical channels that can be integrated into standard IDEs. The details still need to be worked out, but I would imagine something like a channel for querying information about a project, one for a ghci session, and whatever others are needed. These logical channels can then run over whatever transport is appropriate to the specific IDE being integrated.

According to #2 it seems the consensus is toward (re-)using the Idris protocol, as the languages are similar enough and it offers cross-IDE support already.

The Plugin layer and IDE layer are very fuzzy at this point, and there has been some discussion on IRC around it. These layers may well live in a single repository (this one), as two separate layers or just be a feature of how haskell-ide-engine is built.

All the documentation is in the docs folder at the root of this project.