Perhaps there has been some discussion of this, but I could find it after some quick searches here and in GitHub. I would like to float the idea of adding short, explanatory links to compiler error messages and other messages in OCaml platform tools. I think this would be a usability and developer e…

[image] yawaramin: 🔗 ocaml.org/t/type-error Personally, not a huge fan of having urls in the compiler output: urls feel a little to unweildy – sure if your terminal supports it, you can click it to quickly open the page, but otherwise you’ll have to either copy and paste or remember a long st…

Wouldn’t a URL be more direct and convenient than a code that you have to search for? Also I’m not proposing just error codes, I’m proposing shortlinks for any tool or purpose. It would be a general-purpose way of linking to appropriate documentation from any non-web tool.

In terms of related upstream work, I guess I should mention my own RFC for Rust-style error identifiers (in the vein of the Haskell error index announced above, although we are not for now trying to suggest that other tools in the ecosystem should follow the same convention), which was created as ac…

[image] yawaramin: Wouldn’t a URL be more direct and convenient than a code that you have to search for? Why not both? So long as the tool output has a known form (in this case that means unique identifiers for all exceptional conditions), then the mapping from ID to URL and thence to a web …

Thanks for the pointer. In terms of the technical implementation details: We assume a identifier_of_error : error -> Location.error_identifier in each such module, so the change to report_error would be minimal:… It should be possible to make this href_of_error : error -> error_href instead? I…

huge fan of ShellCheck.net error codes, that have a corresponding webpage, e.g. SC1118 → https://www.shellcheck.net/wiki/SC1118 I would prefer more concise urls, however. I establish such for https://seppo.social/m/404/001

[image] yawaramin: It’s not clear to me how exactly the user would use this tooling. If there is a one-to-one mapping from error codes to a website with a better explanation, the compiler can emit the error code alone in its output, then editors or other tooling can implement the functional…

OK, but then we rely on every editor/tooling to implement this functionality. But if we treat the shortlink as the unique identifier itself, it doubles as an unambiguous hyperlink directly. Tools don’t need to learn how to interpret the error codes and direct users to the corresponding link. Regard…

I’m of course in favor of identifiers or shortlinks, but I don’t understand how the problem you point out, which appears to come from a bug in Merlin, would have been solved by identifiers or shortlinks. Can you elaborate?

OCaml compiler/tools error message explanatory links (shortlinks)

Ecosystem

yawaramin February 24, 2023, 4:46am 10

Typical example of the problem my suggestion will solve: 'W: Alert unsynchronized access: Stdlib.Sys.interactive

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OCaml compiler/tools error message explanatory links (shortlinks)

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