[GHC] #1380: Safe Haskell

[GHC]

#1380: Safe Haskell
------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
  Reporter:  igloo            |          Owner:         
      Type:  feature request  |         Status:  new    
  Priority:  normal           |      Milestone:  _|_    
 Component:  None             |        Version:  6.6.1  
  Severity:  normal           |       Keywords:         
Difficulty:  Unknown          |             Os:  Unknown
  Testcase:                   |   Architecture:  Unknown
------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
We should make it easy to do safe (~= no IO) Haskell.

 Things to think about include:
  * Expressions with type IO a
  * unsafePerformIO etc
  * unsafe array indexing functions etc
  * FFI declarations
  * Template Haskell
  * bugs like custom Ix instances allowing incorrect array indexing
  * importing other modules which can do unsafe things (this generalises
 some of the above)
  * Allowing restricted IO functions, e.g. reading/writing functions within
 a certain directory only

 We may want to add support for this to GHC and/or Cabal, e.g. only allow a
 module to be compiled with `-fsafe` if (a) all of its imports are marked
 safe (a new ghc-pkg field) and (b) it only does safe things itself (no TH
 etc). It would also be possible to tell ghc-pkg that you consider a module
 safe.

 There's a proposal at http://www.pphsg.org/safeghc/ for a similar thing,
 but at the value level rather than the module/package level. However, we
 don't think the increased implementation cost is worth the small extra
 benefit it provides.

 One might also worry about resource exhaustion.

 There have also been a number of discussions about his on the mailing
 lists and on IRC, e.g. the thread beginning
 http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2007-May/025941.html

 Working out exactly what it should do is half of the challenge here!

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1380>
GHC <http://www.haskell.org/ghc/>
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
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