mueval-0.8.1: HCAR.tex

% mueval-Gm.tex
\begin{hcarentry}{mueval}
\label{mueval}
\report{Gwern Branwen}%05/10
\participants{Andrea Vezzosi, Daniel Gorin, Spencer Janssen, Adam Vogt}
\status{active development}
\makeheader

Mueval is a code evaluator for Haskell; it employs the GHC API as provided by the Hint library (\url{http://haskell.org/communities/11-2008/html/report.html#hint}). It uses a variety of techniques to evaluate arbitrary Haskell expressions safely \& securely. Since it was begun in June 2008, tremendous progress has been made; it is currently used in Lambdabot live in \#haskell). Mueval can also be called from the command-line.

Mueval features:
\begin{itemize}
\item A comprehensive test-suite of expressions which should and should not work
\item Defeats all known attacks
\item Optional resource limits and module imports
\item The ability to load in definitions from a specified file
\item Parses Haskell expressions with haskell-src-exts and tests against black- and white-lists
\item A process-level watchdog, to work around past and future GHC issues with thread-level watchdogs
\item Cabalized
\end{itemize}

Since the November 2009 HCAR report, the internals have been cleaned up further, a number of minor bugs squashed, tests added, and mueval updated to avoid bitrot.

We are currently working on the following:
\begin{itemize}
\item Refactoring modules to render Mueval more useful as a library
\item Removing the POSIX-only requirement
\item Merging in Chris Done's \href{http://github.com/chrisdone/mueval-interactive}{mueval-interactive} fork, which powers \url{http://tryhaskell.org/}
\end{itemize}

\FurtherReading
The source repository is available:
 \texttt{darcs get}
 \text{\url{http://code.haskell.org/mubot/}}
\end{hcarentry}