base package -- goals

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

I think it would be vv helpful to have all these goals articulated on the wiki page.
          http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/SplitBase

For the "avoiding version bump" goal, I still don't see why having a simple "shim" package on top whose API is stable, and whose version number changes seldom, would not do the job.

Simon

From: Johan Tibell [mailto:johan.tibell at gmail.com]
Sent: 25 February 2013 19:25
To: Joachim Breitner
Cc: glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org; Simon Peyton-Jones
Subject: Re: base package -- goals

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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