GSoC 2020 - a short summary
243 words · 2 min

During summer 2020 I took part in the Google Summer of Code program as a student. It was the first time I applied to such program and also the first time I worked with Haskell outside of an academic context.

The project consisted of porting stylish-haskell to use the ghc-lib-parser library instead of haskell-src-exts.

Stylish-haskell is a code formatter that works by applying Steps to a given Haskell file, each of them performs a specific action (such as aligning imports, removing spaces etc).

The idea was to adopt a gradual approach, keeping both libraries until the port was complete by introducing the possibility to work with either AST.

Taking the parser directly from GHC itself, ghc-lib-parser is more low level and complex than haskell-src-exts.

The starting plan was for me to port the whole project but the ghc-lib-parser library proved to be a significant obstacle so I ultimately ported a few steps and the rest of the work came from other contributions. See the changes and the first release.

This experience helped me to learn how to better handle big projects and libraries. At the end I also felt more involved in the open source world.

I'd like to thank the mentors for volunteering and guiding me throughout the summer.


About · Contact · Posts · Home