[ghc-steering-committee] #583: HasField redesign, rec: accept

[Moritz Angermann]

I’m tempted to recuse myself as well on the technical merits of this
proposal. As others might already expect, I am concerned about this
breaking existing code. Do we have a rough estimate how much this will
break?

It also surfaces a topic we discussed just a short while ago. We have a
feature in a stable compiler release, which we consider experimental, and
thus reserve the right to break? I find this concept still fundamentally
flawed. Anything that is part of stable compiler releases has to be
considered stable by extension and thus needs to be treated with utmost
care.

I can see and fully support the wish to have a language reactor where
things can be experimented with. But if we have this in our stable
releases, it needs to be guarded in a way that users of those features have
to actively opt in to it. I have people seen adopting this feature already,
and I do not believe all of them are aware that this is a bleeding edge
feature that can break without notice at any point in time.

As there is supposedly a backwards compatible implementation for this, I’d
like to ask for this to be considered in two steps:
- backwards compatible change first.
- deprecation and change of syntax second.

Yes, this will be more work on behalf of the implementors. The burden of
change is on the implementors, we can’t expect our users to cover the costs.

For the second part, we should also have a thorough justification for the
need to break.

I’ll leave this with two links:
Simon Marlow’s recent comment:
https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-steering-committee/2023-September/003432.html
Dimitriis Tweet contrasting OCaml to Haskell:
https://x.com/chshersh/status/1704886633856696831?s=46

Best
 Moritz

On Fri, 22 Sep 2023 at 1:21 AM, Joachim Breitner <mail at joachim-breitner.de>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Am Donnerstag, dem 21.09.2023 um 09:37 +0200 schrieb Arnaud Spiwack:
> > Dear all.
> >
> > I submitted my recommendation 3 weeks ago, and only Simon has
> > commented yet. Please let me know your thoughts.
>
> I am essentially ignorant about anything related to records in Haskell,
> and will recuse myself, trusting y’all about this.
>
> Cheers,
> Joachim
>
> --
> Joachim Breitner
>   mail at joachim-breitner.de
>   http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
>
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