[Haskell-cafe] Re: Proposal: register a package as providing several API versions

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 01:57:01PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> Certainly, this is something we want to support.  However, there's an 
> important difference between shared-library linking and Haskell: in 
> Haskell, a superset of an API is not backwards-compatible, because it has 
> the potential to cause new name clashes.

This is the case on Unixy .so systems too, because the namespace is
flat.  If libreadline suddenly starts exporting a symbol named SDL_init,
programs which use both readline and sdl will break.  I have not seen
this happen in practice.  (Which might have something to do with the
aforementioned name mangling :))

Stefan
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