Standard libraries

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello haskell-prime,

one more proposal is about standard libs. it is well known that today
libs outweighs all other parts of modern language and work on their
standardization will probably stall the whole Haskell-prime process.
OTOH, languages like Java was grown due to their rich set of
libraries, which is far more than any committee may even discuss, all
the more invent. afaiu, Java versions just standardize libraries that
are in wide use on the moment of standard acceptance

i propose to do the same. first, library developers should follow
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Package_versioning_policy

second, every year Haskell committee should decide which libraries of
currently Hackage-available are most widely used, portable and free,
and call this set a "Haskell-xxxx standard libraries", together with
versions inspected. Next year some libs may disappear from the list,
some new appear and some upgrade to newer versions. so, we may had:

H2008 libs: base 3.0, FPS 1.0, Binary 1.0
H2009 libs: base 3.0, FPS 2.0, SuperBinary 0.1

With above-mentioned versioning policy, this means that any
"FPS 1.0.*" will comply to the H08 standard and this means that this
line of version may continue to fix bugs, improve performance, add
support for new systems, while keeping its interface

Third, each compiler shipped should declare which HSL (Haskell
Standard Libraries) versions it supports. F.e.:

ghc 7.10: HSL 2010-2014
ghc 7.12: HSL 2011-2014
...

So, every new compiler version will try to support newest HSL versions
and try to keep compatibility with old ones while they last in wide use,
and newer compilers/platforms may be supported by old libs by
publishing their minor modifications (base 3.0.1, base 3.0.2 and so on)

Fourth, this may make Haskell education more organized - i.e. book or
course may declare that it teaches Haskell-2008 standard with HSL-2010
libraries and this will mean that at the end programmer will be able
to use some set of functionality (i.e. all the libs included in the
HSL-2010) and that his knowledge will allow him to immediately start
working with ghc 7.0-8.10, hugs 2010-2015 and jhc 1.0-1.5, for example


One important drawback that i see here is that "full" compiler
downloads should be shipped with older library versions too - i.e.
providing newest FPS library will be not enough, you need to ship
older HSL libraries too


-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                          mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com