Hackage Querying Tool

Introduction

When language designers are considering new language constructs to Haskell they are faced with the question of how those might affect the existing Haskell code. The Haskell community has created a large repository of Haskell code, namely Hackage. But Hackage is currently very hard to query, current methods are hacks that are very hard to use.

Examples of queries that the tool should be able to handle is:

What kind of instance declarations are used in the code base
How many modules uses a particular language feature
Sizes of local function/top level functions/modules

Project Aims

The aim of this project is to create a tool which can be used to ask questions about the code on Hackage in a simple way. The tool itself should be released on Hackage to allow the Haskell community to benefit from using it.

Good libraries for parsing Haskell code are the GHC API or haskell-src-exts

Prereq: Functional Programming, Programming (Languages or Paradigms)
Contact: Josef Svenningsson
Number of People: 1

Learning outcomes:

good understanding of advanced software architecture
experience with software deployment (packaging etc.)
software engineering within functional programming
interaction with an open source community