What Haskell users are actively maintaining or deving software using ghc <8

Wed May 27 15:57:37 UTC 2020

Related question for those folks that still haven't moved to ghc-8. How do you guys write production code with such an old compiler? I am sure using older ghc itself is fine, but how can you rely on outdated libraries that contain bugs and security holes? A lot of the critical libraries do not even support ghc-7.10 (yaml, conduit, tls, resourcet, persistent, cryptonite, crypto-api, yesod, servant, etc.) while other support at most ghc-7.8 (network, aeson, unordered-containers ..) These are just a few libraries from the top downloaded list on Hackage. Also, Carter, you suggested recently that vector might drop support for ghc-7 as well: https://github.com/haskell/vector/issues/297#issuecomment-581601804

I personally rarely use ghc that is older than ghc-8.2, while most of the time I stay on a version that is just one major version short of the latest one that is released, simply because that is usually the latest stackage lts (eg. now it is lts-15, which is ghc-8.8.3)

Alexey.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Wednesday, May 27, 2020 6:25 PM, Helmut Schmidt <helmut.schmidt.4711 at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's nice to verify that my code still works with GHC 7.0 which to my knowledge is the GHC version most compliant to the published Haskell 2010 Report. But I realize that nowadays making do with plain Haskell 2010 and without all those   GHC extensions may not be a popular opinion though.
>
> Am Mi., 27. Mai 2020 um 14:50 Uhr schrieb Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald at gmail.com>:
>
>> Hey all,
>> What are the oldest ghc versions folks are actually using to build software they actually use ? What are the contexts for these ?
>>
>> I know a lot of library maintainers, myself included try to make it easy to suport as wide a version range of ghc as possible.  In my case I find it useful to just have another way to evaluate how stable I can make a library.
>>
>> That said, what actual old ghc versions are folks actually using?
>>
>> Afaict, the oldest ghc currently in a lts linux distro is ghc 7.0 in centos 6
>>
>> Then centos 7 and the oldest Ubuntu lts are 7.6, then more recent distros plus most other os platforms like the bsds are on 8.0-8.4 as the oldest supported / provided ghc.
>>
>> Who are the users today and how important are they for todays library maintainers ?
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