[Haskell-cafe] Re: Could C libraries be part of Haskell Platform?

[Maurí­cio]

 >> This isn't clear to me; in general you only need to bind them
 >> once and then they're available in Haskell. Why not include the
 >> library with its bindings?

There are many ways to bind to a library. The first one isn't
usually the best.

Including the library with its bindings means you have to take
care of doing a portable distribution, something even the authors
of libraries usually find difficult to do. Doing that on one
place (like, say, Haskell Platform) means no one else will have
to do it, at least for a set of libraries.

 > (...) and making BLAS libs available won't help someone like me
 > understand it well enough to work on the bindings.

I hope not! If you can, avoid that kind of work, it won't do you
any good.

Other's like me, however, had to learn FFI, and would like
to do as much as possible to avoid others having to do the
same. However, it's not nice to work on bindings that I know
others (including hackage) won't be able to build and criticize.

Maurício