[Haskell-cafe] Imports as first class functions

[Brandon Allbery]

On Wed, Dec 4, 2024 at 9:31 AM julian getcontented.com.au <
julian at getcontented.com.au> wrote:

> One of the things a little strange about the programming industry is how
> quick we are to invent entirely new languages rather than attempt to modify
> existing ones and beat them into a new more flexible shape so we can
> shoehorn our new requirements into a more flexible frame. I realise it’s
> not always possible, but surely if we all got together and worked on it we
> could do it?
>

Generally at the price of breaking backward compatibility, which is already
a major issue with GHC and would get much worse here.


> It would be *glorious* if stack (or cabal, or whatever package manager we
> use) itself were programmable in the sense that it could be called from
> within Haskell itself using a typed API and data could drive its included
> packages, and its type could be a function whose range was IO ByteString,
> providing the compiled binary.
>

The Cabal library is already largely programmable in this sense, although
as it drives system tools you have the problem that inputs and outputs are
disk files coming from or going to those tools. Changing this requires
changing the system tools, or reimplementing them which would be
prohibitively difficult and subject to regular breakage.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh
allbery.b at gmail.com
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