haskell/bytestring stalled?

[Simon Jakobi]

Hi again, and happy new year! :)

I'd like to revive this thread, now that the holiday season has
passed. Sorry for my somewhat naive attempts to get people involved in
my last emails – I have shortened my CC-list since. :)

I have noticed some healthy activity in the bytestring project in the meantime:

* Duncan suggested in [#198] that GHC 8.10.1 use the existing
bytestring-0.10.10.0 release.

* [#140] has seen more productive discussion on the future of
ByteString's IsString instance, with much valuable input from Herbert.

* At least 3 PRs ([#142], [#196], [#182]) have become ready for merge
(as far as I can tell), although they didn't get a maintainer response
in the last 3 weeks, which I largely attribute to the holidays.

* [#196], which I prepared with the help of Sylvain Henry, fixed the
build of bytestring's benchmark suite which had been broken since 2015
([#52]), and which had been an impediment to many PRs since. This has
allowed me to detect a rather worrying performance regression in GHC
8.10, [#17660].

Many thanks to everyone involved! :)

What remains unclear to me is who will lead the effort of taking care
of bytestring's backlog of open PRs and issues. I still doubt that
Duncan or Herbert have the necessary bandwidth.

Duncan, I would be very grateful if you could share your own
perspective on this in this thread!

Since I had addressed my last email to the CLC, I also wonder about
their perspective on the issue. I have since noticed that bytestring
is in fact not one of the core [libraries] that the CLC officially
maintains. Is the CLC possibly interested in adopting bytestring,
and/or to get involved in improving the maintenance situation in
bytestring? This is just an idea – I don't actually know what power or
resources the CLC could contribute here.

Cheers,
Simon

[#52] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/issues/52
[#140] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/issues/140
[#142] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/pull/142
[#182] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/pull/182
[#196] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/pull/196
[#198] https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/issues/198
[#17660] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/issues/17660
[libraries] https://wiki.haskell.org/Library_submissions#The_Libraries