[Haskell-cafe] Safe Haskell?

[Bertram Felgenhauer]

Bertram Felgenhauer via Haskell-Cafe wrote:
> Unless the use case for which SafeHaskell was designed is common
> (and the replies here indicate that it's not), this is hard to
> justify.

The feedback here is not wholly representative.

There's a reddit thread [1] where djdlc points out

  https://uniprocess.org/effects.html

This is interesting because it demonstrates that the notion of safety
can be *refined* from its use by the `base` library in the context of
DSLs, because one can express which notion of safety applies through
types, and confine the code that is ultimately executed through the
type system.

Obviously this will still break down when the type system is subverted
as in

  https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/9562

which Richard pointed out, or

  https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/19287

which wz1000 demonstrated on IRC. But these are terrible bugs anyway;
it's just that SafeHaskell boosts their implact from code that people
shouldn't write to a potential security issue. Is anybody maintaining
a list of these type system unsoundness issues?

Apparently some people also enjoy the extra code discipline that
producing Safe code requires (link by gentauro (=djdlc) on Freenode):

  http://blog.stermon.com/articles/2019/02/21/the-main-reason-i-use-safe-haskell-is-restriction.html

Cheers,

Bertram


[1] https://reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/msa3oq/safe_haskell/
 or https://teddit.net/r/haskell/comments/msa3oq/safe_haskell/