[jhc] what to work on next?

[Isaac Dupree]

Evangelism (the honest sort), so that you have some users.  In your 
release announcement I would like to hear
- that there are finally enough bugs fixed that JHC is usable.
- that it's as easy to use as GHC for normal coding [can you make a 
Haskell-Platform-with-JHC to install?]
- Which extensions are implemented.
If you get on the haskell-iphone list, you'll have more concentrated 
interest of people because the existing/past GHC overhead [and poorness 
at cross-compiling] matters more there.  But make sure all of Haskell 
knows what's going on!

P.S. for my purposes, the Haskell Platform (including cabal-install) 
would be most important: its release made it 10x easier for me to get a 
working release of GHC!  Then the only barrier might be if I needed some 
extension that Jhc didn't provide.

For example, the extensions in ghc.cabal.in:
     Extensions: CPP, MagicHash, UnboxedTuples, PatternGuards,
                 ForeignFunctionInterface, EmptyDataDecls,
                 TypeSynonymInstances, MultiParamTypeClasses,
                 FlexibleInstances, Rank2Types, ScopedTypeVariables,
                 DeriveDataTypeable, RelaxedPolyRec
CPP is done by Cabal, and MagicHash and UnboxedTuples are kinda 
unimportant, but if would be nice to have the rest of them :-)  And I 
guess you must have existentials, for the new exception library?  (I 
intend to stay away from FunDeps and ATs whenever I can for various 
reasons, not only portability and semantic sense/soundness, but also 
that, once upon a time when I tried to generalize my code using them, it 
only turned into a mess!)

also I wonder, what is JHC's stance on monomorphism? (e.g. 
MonomorphismRestriction, MonoPatBinds, etc.)



John Meacham wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 05:29:23PM -0700, Corey O'Connor wrote:
>> Outside of the compiler itself: A JHC equivalent to ghc-pkg would be
>> nice. That, I'd imagine, would require some Cabal library integration.
> 
> The equivalent of ghc-pkg is delightfully simple. 

Big question for me is just, how well cabal and cabal-install work :-) 
.. I haven't actually done anything useful with ghc-pkg.  maybe ghc-pkg 
list.  Now if ls works, but the names needn't correspond to the package 
contents... does JHC have a way to display the interface of a .hl file 
in a human-readable way?


> If you find yourself writing a lot and want to add a chapter to the
> manual, simply add comments like so
> 
> {- at ChapterName
> 
> markdown formatted text
> 
> -}

Is it Haddock compatible?  Haddock comments would be lovely to read

Thanks for the caring!
-Isaac