[Caml-list] What is the idiomatic way to invoke Merlin (from Ocaml)?

[Caml-list] What is the idiomatic way to invoke Merlin (from Ocaml)?

[Matej Košík]

Hi,

If I have an Ocaml program that would like to take advantage of the services that Merlin provides.

What is the idiomatic/recommended way to interact with it from inside of an Ocaml program?

At the moment, I have a code that works

 (I execute "ocamlmerlin" binary;
  I gather its stdandard output;
  I use "yojson" to parse this output;
  I traverse the JSON soup and find the pieces I want)

but after finishing it, I is "unpretty".

What should I do to make it more "pretty"?

Is it absolutely necessary for me to deal with JSON instead of native Ocaml?
Should I investigate a more seamless Ocaml/JSON mapping?
(JSON may make sense in many scenarios, but in my cases, these are just two Ocaml programs talking).

Or is there a way to cut JSON completely out of the interation and let my program talk to Merlin in Ocaml (and get back Ocaml values)?

Concretely, if I have a question:

  Here is the file; here is the position of an identifier; where is it defined?

I would get (e.g.) value of type (e.g.) "Lexing.position" instead of:

  {
      "class": "return",
      "notifications": [],
      "timing": {
          "error": 0.0,
          "ppx": 0.0,
          "query": 0.0,
          "reader": 0.0,
          "total": 0.0,
          "typer": 0.0
      },
      "value": {
          "file": "/some/absolute/path/to/test.ml",
          "pos": {
              "col": 0,
              "line": 2
          }
      }
  }