[Haskell-cafe] Re: 2008-10-12 Hackage status with GHC 6.10 release candidate

[Simon Marlow]

wren ng thornton wrote:
> Simon Marlow wrote:
>> Don Stewart wrote:
>> >     * GHC.Prim was moved,
>>
>> Nobody should be importing GHC.Prim, use GHC.Exts instead.
> 
> 
> This is oft declared, but as things stand I don't think it's a tenable 
> position. If someone's bothering to dig as far as GHC.Exts then it's 
> very likely they're trying to optimize numeric computations and for that 
> there are a number of functions in GHC.Prim which are essential, in 
> particular the fast conversion functions for numeric types[1]. If those 
> were moved to GHC.Exts then I think many people would be more inclined 
> to heed the advice.

GHC.Exts re-exports the whole of GHC.Prim.  There's no reason to import 
GHC.Prim at all.  Admittedly this isn't immediately obvious from the 
documentation, but it is there.  Hopefully in the future we can improve 
Haddock so that it'll be able to paste in the whole of GHC.Prim into the 
GHC.Exts documentation, and we can then hide GHC.Prim.

Cheers,
	Simon