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Revision as of 16:36, 22 January 2006

This page is primarily for recording the conclusions of ongoing design discussions. That is for documenting the internal design of hIDE.

1 Plugins in General

Almost the whole of hIDE will be dynamically loaded, except for a tiny static core which is responsible for bootstrapping the main application and providing a plugin loading service. You can read more about this application architecture in the paper Dynamic Applications From the Ground Up.

Plugins will be Cabal packages. This provides a number of advantages over simple object files:

• Provides a build infrastructure
• Allows plugins to depend on each other easily
• Allows plugins to be built seperately or "out of tree"
• Provides useful metadata like author, description, license etc
• Big advantage: anyone who's written a cabalised library potentially has written a plugin for us. All they need then do is work out a gui wrapper (perhaps we should provide a skeleton for this).

2 Base components

2.1 The bootup sequence

3 Project management

3.1 Core API

Desired features:

• No import overhead. Must work with all Cabal projects without any user interaction.
• Nice interface for running Cabal commands like 'build', 'haddock' and 'test'.
• Management of the meta info in *.cabal.
  • Menu item: New Cabal Project
  • Custom editor for each GUI to edit .cabal files and report changes back to the main project management API.
• The .cabal file should be validated using the GHC api.
• Files displayed in the file browser should show whether or not they're included in the current project.
• The file browser should allow easy inclusion/exclusion of files from the current project.
• GUI independance. That is the project management API exposed to other hIDE components should not depend on the GUI.

4 Editor

4.1 Yi

The core editor functionality will be provided by Yi, which provides both a standalone editor along the lines of vi or a stripped down emacs, and also a plugin interface.

5 Dependencies, and plugin structure

Gtk2Hs:

   darcs get --partial http://darcs.haskell.org/gtk2hs/

Yi:

   darcs get http://scannedinavian.org/repos/yi/

6 Desirable Plugins

Add more as you think of them:

• The GHC api.
• TeX typesetting (Easier if you have syntax tree available)
• HaRe ( automatic refactoring )
• Darcs ( revision control )
• Pugs ( perl scripting )
• GHCi ( haskell scripting )
• On-the-fly haddockizing?
• Cabal management, a la VH
• Hoogle
• Pointless ( Thomas Jaeger's pointfree refactorer)
• Support for construction of QuickChecks
• Ginsu? (very emacs-ish ;)
• Jump-to-definition in standard library
• Spell checking comments
• auto indenting based on pretty printing the syntax tree
• module dep graph as a module browser view
• compilation via ghc-api (with -fasm)
• automatic insertion of type declarations for expressions
• automatic handling of minimal module imports
• talking to external theorem provers, for example, a la ProofGeneral
• alternating background colour based on bracket level as part of syntax highlighting (syntax backlighting?)
• Harmonia (http://harmonia.cs.berkeley.edu/harmonia/index.html), which gives advanced language-aware facilities

7 Division of labour

Notes on who is doing what, and anything that is unassigned:

• dcoutts
  • develop the UI
  • help with misc gtk issues
  • config subsystem

• dons
  • get yi back into 100% functionality (fill out the broken Yi.Core)
  • complete yi gui based on gtk (i.e. minibuffers, window splitting etc)
  • indenting plugin based on Ppr
  • embed ghci
  • clean interface to syntax highlighting in Yi,
  • get quickcheck tests working with new gtk buffer
  • plugin/standalone-neutral access to ui
  • Reducing dependences
  • pugs plugin for perl scripting?
  • look at darcs plugin

• lemmih
  • CommonSense
  • project management / build support / cabal integration

• unassigned
  • win32 support. See ["hIDE/Win32"]