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> There's finally an effort to update the Haskell spec That's great to hear! But in the future it would also be great if Haskell took a route similar to Rust.
by the_duke 6y ago
> There's finally an effort to update the Haskell spec
That's great to hear!
But in the future it would also be great if Haskell took a route similar to Rust.
In Rust, extensions (called features) only work on the nightly compiler. On stable and beta compilers, they produce an error. Only once they are officially accepted and finalized will they work on stable.
That gives both users and compiler/std lib developers the freedom to experiment, but prevents a proliferation of a complicated feature matrix and centralizes the ecosystem on a coherent language spec.
This has worked out really well. In the early days many users were stuck nightly because of essential features, but by now libraries are expected to work on stable.
- agentultra 6y agoI'm glad that works for Rust but I don't see it being compatible with the way Haskell has been developed. Haskell the language is defined by a specification called the Haskell Report. The last one was Haskell 2010 [0]. The news is that the next version of this report will incorporate advances from several GHC-specific language extensions. How useful this is in modern Haskell remains to be seen. As far as I can tell the de-facto Haskell compiler is GHC. Hugs is unmaintained and UHC and LHC are mostly experimental or in-development. However without a spec we can't get innovation from alternative implementations of the language. [0] https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/ https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/