[Haskell-cafe] Batteries included (Was: GHC is a monopoly compiler)

[Brandon Allbery]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 5:39 PM, Olaf Klinke <olf at aatal-apotheke.de> wrote:

> * To compete with other recent teaching languages, a really simple GUI
> library to use within ghci would be fine. (diagrams and GTK?) Quick Basic
> included "line" and "circle" commands to play with, even though the rest of
> the language did not prepare me for more advanced languages.
>

This turns out to be much easier if you assume that Windows and OS X are
not worth supporting, or are happy with forcing users on those platforms to
jump through annoying hoops (*especially* Windows; there are reasonable
ways to get gtk on OS X, even though it doesn't come with the system, but
Windows is still the Wild West as far as third party libraries are
concerned --- Chocolatey notwithstanding). :/


> As to the versioning and backward compatibility issues of a standard
> library: In my eyes the whole concept of version numbers is broken.
> Dependencies should be stated in terms of type signatures.
>

And ghc in fact uses hashes generated from this. But this has to include
the signatures of internals because they can leak out for inlining --- so
you still have more problems than other languages do.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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