Documentation

Original GHC identities, declarations, recursive groups and foreign metadata. Loading is archival: accompanying foreign build products are retained, not linked or registered with a runtime.

Original unit and module identity.

Hydrated declarations from this interface.

Original groups plus missing local boxed-data wrappers.

Foreign source and lifecycle metadata, retained without linking.

Identity failure detected before Core hydration. Other malformed-interface and way/version failures retain GHC's own diagnostics.

Read a raw installed interface with the selected GHC session's target, package database and NameCache. The expected Module includes the exact unit identity; callers must resolve it through that same session's package state. Nothing means only that this valid interface has no complete Core payload. Wrong identity, way/version and corrupt data are errors, not reasons to substitute ordinary inline unfoldings. Foreign products remain in the archive; successful hydration does not establish executable registration.

Use a session retaining interface pragmas from its creation when possible. Hydration retains pragmas in a private flags/environment value regardless; it does not change the caller's flags or install targets/bytecode. GHC's ordinary dependency loading can populate the session's shared caches.

Use the same serializer as the post-Tidy plugin, without another compile or a source target. Source-note paths survive even if source text is absent. This does not link dependencies or certify runtime support for the module.

Explicit JSON inspection output. With "pretty-diagnostics", retain the rich producer model, including names, types and source Core; otherwise derive inspection from CBD. Never used for normal acquisition or execution.

Byte-oriented version of interfaceCoreJSON, preserving its exact UTF-8 output. Force the strict result before emitting success to retain all-or-error subprocess responses if serialization fails.

Fingerprint the bytes retained by GHC's interface reader, including its tables, complete Core, annotations, foreign products and extensible fields. mi_iface_hash is insufficient: GHC excludes complete Core/foreign payloads from that recompilation hash. No Core hydration or JSON rendering occurs. Return the complete-byte fingerprint, payload availability and conservative demand eligibility. The caller also accounts for dependencies/source-note text.

Check a home interface without hydrating Core or resolving installed dependencies. Compiler-discovered modules need their actual binary identity, not merely a neighboring .hi filename or a source-import guess.