[Haskell-cafe] Design of an extensible system

[Marc Busqué]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2018, John Lato wrote:

> I think you're attempting to optimize the wrong thing. In a dynamic language like Ruby, this approach makes sense because download times are a
> significant fraction of the user's time, and otherwise the user experience isn't affected much because the code is basically interpreted either
> way.
> Haskell is primarily a compiled language. The total download size probably won't be significantly larger from downloading all modules. The cost
> of recompiling/dynamically loading plugins will be expensive (relative to the rest of the user time), and payed with every execution. Plus it's
> additional work for the developer to set up.

What you say makes a lot of sense in terms of optimization. But, what
about extensibility? Take for example the Pandoc package, which would be
similar in design of what I'm trying to do. Say I want to add a
converter to some mark-up format not supported by Pandoc, and that
Pandoc team doesn't agree to merge my work in its repo or simply I don't
have the time to wait until it happens. In this sense, it would be nice
that Pandoc supported dynamically loading of extra plugins on demand.

Marc Busqué
http://waiting-for-dev.github.io/about/