Announce: hs-plugins-0.9.6

[Claus Reinke]

Hi Don,

I think you're providing workarounds for some serious short-
comings in Haskell! while a fully integrated design would be 
nicer (as in the old orthogonally persistent systems - google
for "type-safe linguistic reflection"; or more recently in Clean), 
I look forward to having at least a pragmatically oriented 
subset of the features available. some questions:

is there any particular reason that your list of compatible
platforms seems limited to unix-like systems? or would it 
work on other GHC platforms as well, such as windows
(after all, ghci works there..)?

what is the relation of this to -package ghc? at the moment, 
Simon M. is very busy with all the other things people want, 
but most of the functionality you provide I would hope to 
find there when it comes (will hs-plugins be implemented on 
top of -package ghc, or will its functionality be integrated, 
or will there be separate implementations)? you mention it 
once on page 26, in a way that suggests there should be 
other references to it in this document, which I can't find..

how bad/good are the startup/load times?

I could use some more runtime reflection support in Haskell 
immediately - I'm currently starting ghci as an external process
to load&run generated code, which allows me to make it look 
as if the system just continued running, and to process some 
error messages, but it doesn't really allow me to combine new 
and old code, which is what hs-plugins seems to offer; 
however, I don't want to limit my code to unix systems, and I 
would prefer some convergence on one standardised API.

Cheers,
Claus