A Replacement for GNU Make using Haskell

[ahanwadi@…]

See  Learning Haskell for initial background.

GNU Make is a rule based system generally used to build software. It has its own language for specifying rules on how to remake targets that are out of date with their dependencies. By developing an domain-specific embedded language (DSEL) in Haskell for make, users get the advantage of full functional language.

Interested Students

• Kenn Knowles <kknowles@…>

[neil]

I'd be happy to mentor this, as I've written a Javascript based Make program before, and have worked on rewriting the Yhc build system in Haskell.

[duncan]

Cabal needs something like this. I'll write more detail on what cabal needs.

[chak]

I am not convinced that it makes a lot of sense to have another make. We already have 70% solutions (e.g, ghc --make). Anything better will be a rather serious design effort and require people who have a lot of experience of what's needed in practice. Anything less we hardly get beyond being a toy. And even if a solution would be fully featured, it'd probably get quite complicated and its unclear whether it will be widely adopted.

[dons]

This project makes sense in the context of Cabal. Duncan, do you want to redirect this to a cabal dependency problem...

[nominolo]

I think this project should be dropped and replaced by a Cabal dependency tracking proposal. The current description is rather different than what we have in mind. Duncan said he might prefer to do it himself, though, so let's make it his call then.

[duncan]

I've opened ticket #1552