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

[wren ng thornton]

Simon Marlow wrote:
> 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.

On more recent checking that seems to be the case, however I do recall 
having issues with it in the past. Seems to work on 6.6 too so I'll 
switch my stuff over.

FWIW, if you explicitly re-export the entities by name Haddock will 
paste them in (though that's a lot of copying in the export list).

-- 
Live well,
~wren