Proposal: Add the unordered-containers package and the hashable package to the Haskell Platform

Johan Tibell johan.tibell at gmail.com
Wed Mar 20 22:05:25 CET 2013


On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Thomas Moertel <tom at moertel.com> wrote:

> On the speed vs. security trade-off, there’s a good argument for the
> Haskell Platform to choose security as its default policy: speed problems
> are obvious and have understandable consequences and remedies, but security
> problems are hidden and have poorly understood consequences and often lack
> remedies altogether. You can’t go back in time to remedy being pwned.
>
> Therefore, if we make speed the default, we leave open to harm everybody
> who fails to fully understand the security implications of their libraries’
> default choices, which is just about everybody. But if we make security the
> default, nobody will be taken unaware, either by speed or preventable
> security problems.
>
> Yes, those people who need the extra speed will have to suffer the cost of
> opting-in to the faster implementations, but that cost is predictable and
> relatively small. The point is that nobody is going to be taken unaware by
> failing to make the right choice up front. The first time you run your code
> and it’s too slow, you’ll know.
>

The problem is that if the secure hashing makes HashMap as slow as Map,
there's no point in having the former in the first place, as it only exists
to provide speed.
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