I’m working on a project for analyzing Haskell code. I decided to use GHC to parse the source and infer types rather than write my own code to do that. Right now, I’m slogging through the Haddock docs, but it’s slow going. Does anyone know of a good tutorial?
EDIT: To clarify, I’m not looking for something like hlint. I’m writing my own tool to analyze the runtime characteristics of Haskell code, so it’s like I’m writing a different hlint. What I’m looking for is basically an expansion of the wiki page GHC As a library.
Adam, this is pretty tough sledding. Ever since its launch in 2006, the GHC API has been somewhat underdocumented. What I would recommend is to try to find some small applications that have been written using the GHC API. The right place to ask is probably the GHC users’ mailing list.
One such program is
ghctags, which ships with the GHC source tree. I wrote the original version, but I can’t recommend it—there are so many footprints on the code that I can no longer follow it. The best I can say is that although it’s hard to follow, it’s at least small and hard to follow—much simpler than all of GHC.