Release plans

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 03:54:56PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> - left-to-right impredicative instantiation: runST $ foo

This concerns me.  With each ad-hoc extension of the type system, I
worry that soon the GHC type system will become so byzantine and
ill-specified that the type checker can only be cloned, not
substantially improved on.  I personally have a type checker idea I am
working on, but I doubt I will ever be able to implement features such
as this, because the type checking abstraction is now leaking badly.
Once the Hindley-Damas-Milner algorithm is exposed, I fear programmers
will rely on it and progress in Haskell typechecker implementation
will be effectively halted.  (Yes, I know I'm a bit late in
complaining...)

> - list fusion

Nitpick - you did mean stream fusion, right?

> We think the above feature set makes for a pretty strong 6.8 release.
> 
> What do you think of this plan?  Are there features/bug-fixes that you 
> really want to see in 6.8?

Good code generation for loops.  I understand they are rare in
practice, but it's kinda disheartening to write memset() and see in
the asm loop 11 memory references, 9 to the stack (numbers from
unreliable memory).

I don't mind the plan, either.

Stefan