base package -- goals

[Johan Tibell]

Hi all,

Let me add the goals I had in mind last time I considered trying to split
base.

 1. I'd like to have text Handles use the Text type and binary Handles use
the ByteString type. Right now we have this somewhat awkward setup where
the I/O APIs are spread out and bundled with pure types. Splitting base
would let us fix this and write a better I/O layer.

 2. The I/O manager currently has a copy of IntMap inside its
implementation because base cannot use containers. Splitting base would let
us get rid of this code duplication.

I'm less interested in having super fine-grained dependencies in my
libraries. More packages usually means more busy-work managing
dependencies. Taken to its extreme you could imagine having base-maybe,
base-bool, and whatnot. I don't think this is an improvement. Splitting
base into perhaps 3-5 packages (e.g. GHC.*, IO, pure types) should let us
get a bunch of benefits without too many downsides.

-- Johan
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