Haskell Mode perspective on external tooling

[Gracjan Polak]

Hi haskell-ide,

I'd like to offer a bit of insight how the current tooling situation looks from the point of view of Haskell Mode project. Haskell Mode is vitally interested in reducing complexity in the tooling department as it directly impacts Haskell Mode users. 

Haskell Mode interacts with many external tools:

• GHCi in shell mode
  
• GHCi in interactive mode
  
• GHCi-ng
  
• cabal repl
  
• stack repl
  
• nix-shell overrides of the above
  
• scan reformatting tool (http://projects.haskell.org/style-scanner/)
  
• stylish-haskell reformatting tool
• hlint
• hoogle
• hayoo
• ghc-pkg is also colled directly
• cabal and cabal files are parsed directly

As you see there is quite some duplication on this list. Our brain power needs to be better focused and better channelled the current amount of keyboard-hours devoted to Haskell Mode render support for such multitude of tools very hard. There are also eternal projects that crucially depend on haskell mode.

Current situation is suboptimal both from the developers and the potential contributors point of view. Users find themselves at loss how to put necessary pieces together, then they are unsure how to contribute to projects of their choosing. Developers should be offered default options working reasonably well out of the box and potential contributors should find it much easier to contribute to already existing projects. I think we can get there with a bit of coordination between projects and I hope haskell-ide will serve as a vehicle for that.

-- 

Gracjan