Thursday, November 13, 2014

Operators on Hackage

Summary: I wrote a script to list all operators on Hackage, and which packages they are used by.

In GHC 7.10 the *> operator will be moving into the Prelude, which means the Shake library will have to find an alternative operator (discussion on the mailing list). In order to pick a sensible operator, I wanted to list all operators in all Hackage packages so I could be aware of clashes.

Note that exported operators is more than just those defined by the package, e.g. Shake exports the Eq class, so == is counted as being exported by Shake. However, in most cases, operators exported by a package are defined by that package.

Producing the file

First I downloaded the Hoogle databases from Hackage, and extracted them to a directory named hoogle. I then ran:

ghc --make Operators.hs && operators hoogle operators.txt

And uploaded operators.txt above. The code for Operators.hs is:

import Control.Exception.Extra
import Control.Monad
import Data.List.Extra
import System.Directory.Extra
import System.Environment
import System.FilePath
import System.IO.Extra

main = do
    [dir,out] <- getArgs
    files <- listFilesRecursive dir
    xs <- forM files $ \file -> do
        src <- readFileUTF8' file `catch_` \_ -> readFile' file `catch_` \_ -> return ""
        return [("(" ++ takeWhile (/= ')') x ++ ")", takeBaseName file) | '(':x <- lines src]
    writeFileUTF8 out $ unlines [unwords $ a : nub b | (a,b) <- groupSort $ concat xs]

This code relies on the normal packages distributed with GHC, plus the extra package.

Code explanation

The script is pretty simple. I first get two arguments, which is where to find the extracted files, and where to write the result. I then use listFilesRecursive to recursively find all extracted files, and forM to loop over them. For each file I read it in (trying first UTF8, then normal encoding, then giving up). For each line I look for ( as the first character, and form a list of [(operator-name, package)].

After producing the list, I use groupSort to produce [(operator-name, [package])] then writeFileUTF8 to produce the output. Running the script takes just over a minute on my ancient computer.

Writing the code

Writing the code to produce the operator list took about 15 minutes, and I made some notes as I was going.

  • I started by loading up ghcid for the file with the command line ghcid -t -c "ghci Operators.hs". Now every save immediately resulted in a list of warnings/errors, and I never bothered opening the file in ghci, I just compiled it to test.
  • I started by inserting take 20 files so I could debug the script faster and could manually check the output was plausible.
  • At first I wrote takeBaseName src rather than takeBaseName file. That produced a lot of totally incorrect output, woops.
  • At first I used readFile to suck in the data and putStr to print it to the console. That corrupted Unicode operators, so I switched to readFileUTF8' and writeFileUTF8.
  • After switching to writeFileUTF8 I found a rather serious bug in the extra library, which I fixed and added tests for, then made a new release.
  • After trying to search through the results, I added ( and ) around each operator to make it easier to search for the operators I cared about.

User Exercise

To calculate the stats of most exported operator and package with most operators I wrote two lines of code - how would you write such code? Hint: both my lines involved maximumBy.

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