Question about the portability of containers

[David Feuer]

I really *wish* we had another viable and relevant Haskell
implementation we could test against. That would be *great*. The
containers package is quite venerable, long predating my own
involvement. For its entire life, it has had a tradition of trying to
be portable. It seems somewhat sad to throw all that away. I believe
there *is* an alternative option, but it will require someone to put
in a significant amount of work to make it happen. The basic idea is
to replace direct checks for __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ with ones for our own
version of that. Normally, __OUR_GLASGOW_HASKELL__ will be equal to
__GLASGOW_HASKELL__, but we can also choose to leave it undefined
using a Cabal option or some such. That way, we can at least run CI
with our "non-GHC" code and make sure that it still works.

On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 10:59 PM Fumiaki Kinoshita <fumiexcel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I noticed that there are massive amount of CPP pragmas to switch code between GHC and non-GHC (e.g. https://github.com/haskell/containers/blob/v0.6.2.1/containers/src/Data/IntMap/Internal.hs#L4), and they are a burden for maintainers. Moreover, the non-GHC part of the codebase is untested due to the lack of viable alternative compilers (https://github.com/haskell/containers/pull/728#discussion_r436318206).
>
> Therefore I propose to revisit the policy for portability of core libraries. Portability is not a bad thing, but few people use other compilers these days. The drag is only likely to increase because there's no plan (AFAIK) for a new Haskell standard.
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