[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Re: compiler-independent core libraries infrastructure

[John Meacham]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 05:12:34PM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> So, just to confirm in my mind what you are proposing:
> 
> Compiler/Version specific Core:
> 
> Yhc.Core, Hugs.Core, GHC.Core ....
> 
> With a different version for each compiler version. Tied intimately to
> the compiler.

A large issue with this, is that what needs to be tied intimately to the
complier is very different for different compilers. for instance
Data.Typeable and Data.Dynamic are fairly portableish haskell on ghc,
but are primitives provided by the compiler in jhc as a very simple
example.

It leads to the current mess with the jhc libraries where it has bits
and pieces of base. I can't just use base as is, because it implements a
lot that jhc needs to implement natively or expects things that GHC.*
provides, but Jhc.* doesn't, or at least provides with a different
interface/semantics (and #ifdefs or tieing jhc's development with the
fptools repos  are not acceptable solutions) However, a lot of stuff
depends on libraries provided by base, so I can't just ignore it.

so I end up syncing some code from base, modifying some, having a big
mess that is somewhat tricky to maintain.

In any case, haskell-prime will clean this up some by giving a more
complete compiler-provided set of libraries, and it looks like the
fptools repos are moving in the right direction with modularization.


        John


-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈