Chris Smith wrote:
Can someone clarify what's going on with the standard library in
Haskell?
As of right now, I can download, say, GHC from haskell.org/ghc and get a
set of libraries with it. I can visit
http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/, linked from the
haskell.org home page, and see descriptions of all of those libraries.
I can build with --make (or if I'm feeling masochistic, add several
lines of -package options) and it works. That's all great.
I've seen some stuff lately on -libraries and this list indicating that
there's an effort to change this. People asking whether something
should be included in the standard library are being told that there is
no standard library really. I'm hearing that the only distinction that
matters is "used by GHC" or "not used by GHC", and that being on hackage
is as official as it gets.
Am I misunderstanding?
Is there something awesome about Hackage that I'm not seeing?
My take on it is this: Hackage is a pre-requisite for a comprehensive
well-maintained standard library. We don't have a comprehensive standard
library yet, but from Hackage will emerge a large number of components that
will someday be reviewed and filtered by a group of people who define the
standard library. This might be part of the Haskell prime effort, or a
subsequent library standardisation process.
I agree that a standard library is important, I also believe it's vital
that we have an effective distributed collaborative mechanism by which good
libraries can emerge. In the early days of the hierarchical libraries I
think we tried to define a defacto standard set of libraries which we
shipped with the various compilers; I now believe the distributed model
will achieve better results in the long run, and the rate at which Hackage
is growing seems to back this up. This is why we developed the package
system and Cabal, and why we no longer have a single global module
namespace - every package author has the right to independently choose what
their modules are called.
Cheers,
Simon
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