Deprecating Safe Haskell, or heavily investing in it?

[Jaro Reinders]

I do agree that Safe Haskell would be useful even if it was only used for 
enforcing type safety and avoiding accidental use of unsafe features, but the 
paper [1] makes it quite clear that one of the main goals is to safely execute 
untrusted code:

"Safe Haskell makes it possible to confine and safely execute untrusted, 
possibly malicious code. By strictly enforcing types, Safe Haskell allows a 
variety of different policies from API sandboxing to information-flow control 
to be implemented easily as monads.
[..]
We use Safe Haskell to implement an online Haskell interpreter that can 
securely execute arbitrary untrusted code with no overhead."

Cheers, Jaro

[1] https://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/terei:safe-haskell.pdf

On 13-01-2023 18:06, Carter Schonwald wrote:
> Indeed type safety is exactly what it’s for! The other notions of safety were 
> never part of the goals. And it was designed so that the end user could decide 
> which codes they deem trustworthy.
> 
> On Wed, Dec 28, 2022 at 6:04 PM davean <davean at xkcd.com 
> <mailto:davean at xkcd.com>> wrote:
> 
>     The only part of Safe Haskell I ever really cared about was type safety.
>     That's what matters, I think.
> 
>     I've wanted to use it a number of times and played with it, but it's never
>     actually managed to become an important part of anything for me.
>     So take that as you will. I'd love it if it worked well, its issues have
>     limited what I attempt, but at the end of the day it's never hurt me too
>     bad to not have it.
> 
> 
>     -davean
> 
>     On Wed, Dec 28, 2022 at 7:14 AM Tom Ellis
>     <tom-lists-haskell-cafe-2017 at jaguarpaw.co.uk
>     <mailto:tom-lists-haskell-cafe-2017 at jaguarpaw.co.uk>> wrote:
> 
>         On Tue, Dec 27, 2022 at 08:33:04PM -0700, Chris Smith wrote:
>          > This conversation reminds me of a parable I encountered somewhere,
>         in which
>          > someone declares "I don't understand why this decision was ever
>         made, and I
>          > we should change it", and someone responds, "No, if you don't understand
>          > the decision was made, then you don't know enough to change it.  If you
>          > learn why it was decided that way in the first place, then you will have
>          > the understanding to decide whether to change it."
> 
>         That parable is Chesterton's fence:
> 
>         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence
>         <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence>
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