[Haskell-cafe] expanded standard lib

[Andrew Coppin]

Justin Bailey wrote:
> On Nov 19, 2007 10:25 AM, brad clawsie <clawsie at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>   
>> so far the haskell community has taken the cpan route for most
>> practical libs but i wonder if a "batteries included" approach might
>> help get some key libraries to a more complete state. in particular, i
>> would like to see support for basic internet protocols, database
>> connectivity, and potentially xml parser support rolled into the ghc
>> standard libs. there is always a strong debate on where the line is
>>     
>
> I agree strongly. I particularly miss a "standard" HTTP library.
>   

Personally, I miss clean binary I/O, configurable character encodings, 
and an "easy" API for working with bitmapped images (loading them, 
saving them, displaying them, etc.)

I could also reel off a whole bunch of other stuff I'd like to have - 
but that doesn't write the code, does it?

Hackage seems like a nice idea in principle. However,

- The packages seem to be of quite variable quality. Some are excellent, 
some are rather poor (or just not maintained any more).
- Almost all packages seem to require a long list of dependencies.
- There seems to be an awful lot of packages that do the same thing but 
with incompatible interfaces (and varying limitations). It seems we're 
not very coordinated here.
- (And, since I'm on Windows, I can't seem to get anything to install 
with Cabal...)

Unfortunately, while it's very easy to point out failings in a given 
system, it's much harder to propose viable ways to fix things... :-(