about compiler-independent base

[Simon Marlow]

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Simon,
> 
> Tuesday, April 3, 2007, 2:21:34 PM, you wrote:
> 
>> This is not an attempt to solve all the issues we have in one go, but a
>> practical incremental step towards the goal.  I'm not trying to make base
>> compiler-independent for example; that's a worthy goal, but it's not clear (at
>> least to me) how to get there yet.
> 
> i'm all for this plan. long way starts with first step
> 
> about "making base compiler-independent". its *interface* is already
> compiler-independent. if you say about implementation, it seems rather
> obvious for me - split it into ghc-base package that includes GHC.*
> and modules on which GHC.* depend and new-base package which contains
> the rest. then move any "#ifdef GHC" code into from new-base into
> *hc-base. then, as time permits, we can start to move ghc-independent
> code from ghc-base into new-base. meantime, faking Base package may be
> established that just reexports ghc-base and new-base, so user will
> not depend on where we moved each particular module

Apart from anything else, we don't actually have support for packages that
re-expose modules from other packages.  This is an important feature and will
indeed make package refactoring easier - care to look into implementing it? :-)

Cheers,
	Simon