[ghc-steering-committee] Please review: Int8/Word8, Shepherd: Simon Marlow

[Simon Marlow]

I recommend that we accept this proposal.

The proposal itself I think is uncontroversial: the current situation is
somewhat historical; we realised when implementing the Data.Int and
Data.Word libraries that it would be easier to build on top of a small
family of narrow# primitives than to implement full sized types, so we took
the shortest route at the time. That stopgap has served well up to this
point, but we're missing some functionality that proper sized types would
give us: better packing of unboxed fields in constructors, and in general
better consistency in the internals (e.g. I think sized types will allow
the removal of some ugly hacks in the FFI to do with calling external
functions that take small integer arguments).

So, while the proposal itself is uncontroversial, I expect there to be a
lot to do at the code review stage to ensure we integrate this smoothly
(e.g. the issues around calling conventions and LLVM integration). But
that's not a concern for this committee, so I recommend we just accept.

Cheers
Simon

On 8 February 2018 at 03:40, Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de>
wrote:

> Dear Committee,
>
> this is your secretary speaking:
>
> Small types like `Int8#`/`Word8#` were proposed
> https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/74
>
> I propose Simon Marlow as the Shepherd.
>
> Simon, please reach consensus as described in
> https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals#committee-process
>
> I suggest you make a recommendation about the decision, maybe point out
> debatable points, and assume that anyone who stays quiet agrees with
> you.
>
> Thanks,
> Joachim
> --
> Joachim Breitner
>   mail at joachim-breitner.de
>   http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
>
> _______________________________________________
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