[Haskell-cafe] Arrays in base... (was: ... indexing lists)

[Viktor Dukhovni]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 10:58:49AM +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Mar 2021, Viktor Dukhovni wrote:
> 
> > Thus I applaud Michael Snoyman's quest to address the absense of a basic 
> > array type in the `base` library.  Perhaps more users would stop abusing 
> > lists (memoisable iterators) as an indexed store.
> 
> Data.Array actually _was_ part of base-3.
> 
> However, I think we should split 'base' in more smaller parts rather than 
> making it bigger.

FWIW, I don't think that splitting base into multiple libraries would
achieves much, it would likely raise the cost of coordinating
versioning.

I do however agree that perhaps separating base from GHC could be a good
idea, if GHC could ship a smaller foundational library with primops, ...
and `base` evolved somewhat independently.

However that too has potential drawbacks, because packages would be more
likely to have non-overlapping version bounds on a separately evolving
base...  Probably manageable, but something to keep in mind.

-- 
    Viktor.