FP Complete


After many years of development, FP Complete is very happy and proud to announce the open sourcing of ide-backend. ide-backend has served as the basis for our development of School of Haskell and FP Haskell Center, by providing a high level, easy to use, and robust wrapper around the GHC API. We’d like to express our thanks to Duncan Coutts, Edsko de Vries, and Mikolaj Konarski for implementing this library on our behalf.

ide-backend provides a means to do a variety of tasks involving GHC, such as:

For much more information, you can see the Haddock documentation.

Members of the Commercial Haskell Special Interest Group have encouraged us to open source more of our work, to help them build more tools useful to real-world developers. We’re happy to contribute.

ide-backend opens the possibility for many new and interesting tools. To give some ideas:

I’ve shared information about this repository with some maintainers of existing tools in the Haskell world already, and hopefully now with the complete move to open source, we can start a much broader discussion going.

But today’s release isn’t just a code release; we also have demos! Edsko and Chris have been collaborating on some next-generation editor plugins, and have put together ide-backend-client with support for both Emacs and Atom. Chris has put together a screencast of his Emacs integration:

We also have an early prototype tool at FP Complete for inspecting a code base and getting type information, based on ide-backend, GHCJS, and React.

Where we go from here

Open sourcing this library is just the first step.

I’m excited to hear everyone’s thoughts on this library, and look forward to seeing some awesome tools appear.

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