Building an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on top of a Build System: The tale of a Haskell IDE

When developing a Haskell IDE we hit upon an idea – why not base an IDE on an build system? In this paper we’ll explain how to go from that idea to a usable IDE, including the difficulties imposed by reusing a build system, and those imposed by technical details specific to Haskell. Our design has been successful, and hopefully provides a blue-print for others writing IDEs.