[Xmonad] dynamic configuration? (e.g. hsplugins)

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

droundy:
> On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 10:39:43AM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> > > It'd be nice to know that there's a plan (or at least desire) to make
> > > xmonad useable by folks who aren't willing to compile their own software,
> > > and who don't think that one copy of each program per user is a good idea.
> > 
> > There's some desire, but it is balanced by the constraint that existing
> > extensible systems in Haskell aren't really suitable: either too
> > heavyweight (hs-plugins, ghc-api) or not supporting the language (YHC).
> > 
> > Also, these are all relatively more unstable solutions. If something
> > changes in this area, we can look again at it.
> 
> In what sense are hs-plugins and ghc-api too heavyweight? In the sense of
> memory-use and efficiency, or the sense of API complexity?

ghc-api is a 20M dependency, and not available on systems without ghci :/
hs-plugins requires ghc be available in the path -- its lighter weight 
than ghc-api, but still seems unnecessary (it effectively automtes the
recompilation phase currently done manually).

> If it's the former, I'd say it doesn't much matter.  If it's the latter,
> then that's a real problem, and someone ought to come up with a simple API
> to hs-plugins to enable the use of Haskell as a scripting language.  I sort
> of thought that this was what hs-plugins was (a stable easy-to-program
> layer over ghc-api).

Its a stable api over dynamic linking and compilation. Works well for
plugins, works less well for dynamic extensions. For the latter, an
interpreter/bytecode is best, and we have ghc-api there. But its too
unstable and too big yet.

-- Don