splinterofchaos/neovim

vim for the 21st century

neovim's Issues

Haskell Client

I will use this space for myself to jot down notes I have about writing a Haskell client.

First problem: msgpack-rpc has not been updated for Haskell in a long time.
I could not successfully install msgpack-rpc with Cabal, and it's likely others would have the same problem. Inconsistencies between installed versions as documents, and the almost complete lack of documentation, makes this an unlikely path for getting anything done soon.

Solution: Write all the relevant msgpack stuff in C and link to that from Haskell.
There should be no issue in writing a C API that abstracts the message passing interface and write a Haskell client that defines the transformations from C types to Haskell types. This may also potentially be more convenient for writing clients in other languages as well.

The Haskell client should look something like this:

main = do
  connection <- neovimServer "/tmp/neovim" 
  buf <- getBuffer connection 0
  setBuffer connection 0 buf
  disconect connection

Where connection has a type encoding the socket to "/tmp/neovim", getBuffer requests the buffer at idx (like the Python client's vim.buffer[x]) through the socket and waits on the response, and setBuffer sends a message to the socket telling neovim to replace the buffer with buf. The type of buf itself could be as simple as [String], however Data.Text or ByteString may prove more efficient.