[Haskell-cafe] expanded standard lib

Jeremy Shaw jeremy.shaw at linspireinc.com
Mon Nov 19 16:10:08 EST 2007


At Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:25:40 -0800,
brad clawsie 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. 

The recent trend has to to roll less into the ghc standard libs. There
are a number of reasons for this. People complain it takes to long to
build all of GHC, it makes it harder to port GHC to embedded platforms
where many of the libraries are not needed or are hard to
support. Libraries tend to only get updated as often as GHC (which is
far to infrequent for many libraries).

What if instead of rolling the libraries into GHC, they were rolled
into task-specific bundles. For example, a bundle of internet
libraries (http, xml, etc), a bundle of unix support libraries, etc.

These bundles could be created and managed by third parties. The
bundles might just be references to specific versions of packages
already in hackage ?

This would give you the power that comes from branding certain
packages as recommended, but with (hopfully) less baggage than putting
them in the GHC distribution itself?

j.



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