Endgame

It seems that the build targets feature I previously wrote about is somewhat more work than I expected, mainly in terms of integration with the Eclipse GUI. With my university classes starting soon, and some work that I’ve been pushing ahead of me throughout GSoC, I am unable to finish this in time.

Therefore, I’ve parked the build target feature in a branch and decided to officially put a stop to this project for the time being. I have updated the EclipseFP web site to reflect the work I did. I also rolled a release that you can pull in using the Eclipse update mechanism. The details are provided on the web site.

I cannot say that I’m fully happy with the results that I achieved. I had hoped to get more mileage out of the integration with Scion, but adding all these features through the Eclipse API turned out to be hairier than I expected. However, I do feel I have made useful contributions on which future work can build.

I would like to thank my mentor, Thomas Schilling a.k.a. nominolo, for his guidance and his work on Scion. I would also like to thank Leif Frenzel, without whom EclipseFP wouldn’t have existed in the first place. And finally, thanks to the folks at Google who made GSoC a reality.

For now, I am forced to other business that I’ve been neglecting for far too long. Does that mean that EclipseFP is going to disappear from the radar again? I think not. There is sufficient interest in Haskell IDEs to keep this project going, and somebody will come along and keep improving upon it. Such is the nature of open source. And that somebody… might actually be me.

Update: it isn’t me after all. Less than a week after I wrote this, JP Moresmau chimed in on the mailing list, reporting some bugs, offering to fix them, then continue from there. He’s now taken over development. If you want to try EclipseFP, I recommend his latest version from here!