[Haskell-cafe] Safe Haskell?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Mon, 26 Apr 2021, Tom Ellis wrote:

> I'm curious whether there's anyone in this thread who takes a different 
> point of view, in absolute terms.
>
> The point of contention for me (and I would guess for others too) is 
> whether meagre resources at our disposal should be put towards 
> SafeHaskell and other Haskell-based language checkers, or we should just 
> use what the (comparatively) large and experienced Linux, *BSD, etc.. 
> developers are already providing and many users are already using for 
> hardening efforts.

When SafeHaskell came out I found it a good way to mark modules as Safe in 
order to be warned by GHC if they are actually unsafe. Unfortunately I did 
not mark many modules this way.

If GHC features are too complex to give such safeness warranties then I 
think this is a problem on its own. How would we evaluate code of other 
authors? Today, I would add Safe to all modules of a critical package and 
watch where that fails and why. This use case cannot be managed by any 
sandboxing, container or virtualization technique.