Summary
The Extended Dependency Generation GHC Proposal was opened by David Eichmann in early July, 2019. The intent was to make detailed dependency data available in an easily consumable form. This information is mostly already available within GHC, but not accessible outside.
Motivation
With the additional information, consuming projects such as Stack, Cabal, HLS, and those using other build systems such as Nix and Bazel, can produce minimal incremental builds with as much accuracy as possible.
Anyone who has interacted with a Haskell codebase of significant size knows the pains of build times. The Haskell Foundation sees improvements in this area to be a key to many toolchain scenarios, including IDE integration (HLS), CI turnaround reduction, and giving new Haskellers a better out of the box experience.
Request
Maintainers of HLS, Stack, Cabal, and Nix/Bazel systems for Haskell
We need feedback on the dependency data points and format of that data so we can have the first implementation of this proposal be as usable and useful as possible.
Community Members and Project Maintainers
Your feedback on projects in this space we’re not aware of, and scenarios you’d like to see enabled by this feature, is very important. Please read and give feedback on the proposal and add your perspective!