Priorities for 6.10

[Simon Marlow]

> On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 12:39 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
>
> >  * Back-end rewrite, remove mangler (see also #1501)
> >  * shared libraries (#1876)
> >  * parallel GC (close #1589, #2185)
> >  * Haddock 2 (see also #1964 (GHC.Prim), #2335 (build problem))
> >  * Unicode encoding/decoding for Text I/O handles.  Consensus was that
> Text I/O should always use
> >    the current locale encoding.
> >  * Put in place a robust solution to the backwards-compatibility problem
> >  * Extensible exceptions
> >  * More library reorganisation
> >  * binary package DB, or at least make the one-file-per-package work
> (#723, #2089)
> >  * ^C should raise an exception by default (also SIGPIPE, see #1619)
>
> I think that pretty much covers my priorities.
>
> > Please circulate any additional items you can think of.  I'm working
> > on getting the parallel GC in now, and I've started looking at Unicode
> > support in Handles, meanwhile I'm thinking about the
> > backwards-compatibility problem.
>
> I got GNU libiconv (LGPL) working on windows btw. It can be built using
> Cabal (the C code, not just the binding). It makes a static lib that's
> almost 1 megabyte. Building as a shared lib would be preferable but
> that's of course tricky on Windows (not the building, but getting the
> runtime linker to find the dlls). It could be reduced in size by
> excluding more encodings.

I think I might try to use the built-in encoding/decoding support on Windows, and iconv on Unix systems.  We'll see how that works out.

Cheers,
        Simon