[Haskell-cafe] Would you use frozen-base

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Donnerstag, den 26.02.2015, 20:50 +0100 schrieb Bardur Arantsson:
> Having actually worked with code using this approach to versioning, I
> think I can safely say that it is absolute hell in practice -- way worse
> than sprinkling a few CPP directives here and there.

Interesting, and good to hear about that!

>  Granted, in my
> particular case data structures were also versioned thusly, and so you'd
> end up with reams of boilerplate (but only sometimes boilerplate!)
> Bool1<->Bool2 conversion code.

The way I imagine it to work, this would happen here, as the actual data
type will always be the one from the current system’s base.

> Similar problems would ensue if semantics
> of Foo1.frobnicate() and Foo2.frobnicate() were subtly different, but
> you'd happened to call the wrong one. Not to mention all the namespace
> pollution if you need to access both Foo1 and Foo2 in the same module.

Well, that should not ever need happen (comparable to how today, you
never access base-4.6:Foo and base-4.7:Foo in the same package – I
hope).

> There's also the mental overhead of having to be aware of all the Foo1,
> Foo2, ... modules and the differences between them. (There's probably a
> lot more pain that I've just repressed, but that's just off the top of
> my head.)
> 
> The proper solution to this problem (as with so many things) is another
> layer of indirection, namely a proper way to separate API and
> implementation. (Aka "Backpack" or similar.)

But that is precisely what frozen-base is trying to provide – just APIs,
no implementations. Note that it should merely re-export stuff from base
(or maybe base-compat or similar), and simply guarantee that the set of
exported functions of one particular module does not change any more.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
  Jabber: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de  • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F
  Debian Developer: nomeata at debian.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20150227/d8e3f6ee/attachment.sig>