Any objection to converting the pretty printer to Reason? about reason HOT 7 CLOSED

I was thinking the same.

from reason.

The pretty printer currently uses objects/classes, and those were recently disabled (because they deferred to the build in pretty printer). We could either trivially make it not use objects (a bunch of recursive let bindings instead) or implement objects.

I have a giant stack of diffs that I'm waiting to land as soon as the Easy_format changes are pushed to OPAM, so I think it would be best to implement it after I land those to prevent many merge conflicts.

from reason.

I think we are almost ready for this.

from reason.

This is depending on #63

from reason.

I thought this would be difficult to self-host because of the challenges in building Reason from source, when you don't have an available Reason. But then I realized we can use a simple trick. The OCaml compiler (supposedly) supports loading files that are simply serialized ASTs. (The same output that -pp accepts, and the same output that refmt spits out by default).

So we can simply check in the serialized AST for reason_pprint_ast and friends. Our build scripts for Reason can simply disregard the actual .re files and only ever build the serialized AST files. The result is that it successfully builds a version of Reason that is a binary, even if Reason was not originally installed.

from reason.

@jordwalke Interesting idea. If we are able to do that, I imagine we can even write parsers in reason as well (need to add a -pp option in Menhir first).

from reason.

Stale, will keep it in ocaml for now

from reason.