[Haskell-cafe] Adding Content-Addressable Storage to GHC

[Tom Ellis]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 11:21:29AM +0000, Chris Done wrote:
>    Is there any effort or designs ongoing to add CAS (content-addressable
>    storage) to GHC, as in Unison? <
>    https://www.unisonweb.org/docs/tour/>
>    == The idea ==
>    The summary of the idea is simply that top-level declarations can be
>    addressed by a hash of their contents. Recursive definitions are
>    transformed into the worker/wrapper to eliminate the self-referencing
>    issue of hashing.

I started wanting this recently, although I can't remember why.  As
far as I can see there are two distinct things that one might want

1. To be able to come up with a hash for each expression.

2. To be able to look up that hash somewhere to recover the expression.

I was only interested in 1.  Please correct me if I'm wrong but it
seems from your description that your use case only requires 1 too.

Anyway, I think this is a great idea.

Tom