Proposal: priority queues in containers

[wren ng thornton]

Louis Wasserman wrote:
> Thomas Schilling wrote:
>> Nevertheless, the libraries bundled with GHC are those libraries that
>> GHC itself needs and which therefore cannot be upgraded independently.
>>  The real standard libraries are the Haskell Platform and if your
>> package is part of the platform, then your package *is* in status
>> equivalent to things like java.util.*.
>
> Okay, let me ask the following question:
> 
> Would anybody besides me be heartbroken if priority queues *weren't* put
> into containers, but were instead put into the Platform?


So long as there's a pqueue implementation in the Platform, I wouldn't 
be heartbroken. I can see how it'd be nice to put it in containers 
(e.g., people just need to depend on containers in their .cabal files) 
but now that the Platform is here I don't see any big reasons to want to 
make the packages in it any bigger when a separate package would do the 
same job just as well.

By putting the pqueue implementation into containers that means everyone 
using containers will have a larger library to link against (unless GHC 
is smarter than I suspect), regardless of whether they use pqueues. 
Unless I'm wrong about how smart GHC is, that implies that the 
containers package should[1] even be broken up to facilitate smaller 
binaries.


[1] Ignoring backwards compatibility issues.

-- 
Live well,
~wren