[Haskell] Haskell Xlib bindings

[Sven Panne]

On Tuesday 13 February 2007 14:15, Simon Marlow wrote:
> This all seems reasonable if the goal is to provide an XCB layer in
> Haskell. But I have to ask the question: why?  The only user of the X11 lib
> is HGL, and that's been ported to GtkHs now (ISTR), so who are the clients
> for an XCB layer? [...]

The conclusion of the above reasoning would be "rm -rf libraries/X11", but I 
wouldn't go that far... ;-) And similar arguments could be made for Win32. 
Anyway, I think there are a few reasons why something like XHB could make 
sense:

   * Fewer dependencies (no Xlib needed)

   * Automatic generation of almost all parts, leading to a very consistent 
API

   * Availability of dozens of protocol extensions for X11 for free, the X11 
package has only the bare bones X11

   * The possibility to use XHB in a multi-threaded setting (Xlib has only 
very arcane support for this, so everything is basically single-threaded)

   * Although Xlib will definitely stay with us for a long, long time, it 
seems to be a bit "deprecated".

   * The current X11 package needs a serious code review to fix the types.

Apart from that, there are a few personal interests:

   * Improve my rusty XSLT skills

   * Test the available XML tools in/for Haskell

   * Get some ideas for a better networking package. BTW: What is the status 
of this? Is anybody already working on this? The current package has no clean 
layering, lacks most modern networking features, does a few things "behind 
the back" (which is often not what one wants), etc. Although I do not have 
enough time to push this actively, I would be very interested in joining such 
a "Let's build a better network package" task force...

Cheers,
   S.