Re: Making GHCi awesomer?

On Oct 20, 2014, at 09:14, Ben Gamari wrote:

Simon Peyton Jones writes:

...

Christopher

You are doing very cool things. Thank you.

What I’m puzzled about is this: the GHC API *is* a programmatic interface to GHC. Why not just use it?

One issue that sometimes bites me when trying to compile against GHC is that of dependencies. When compiling against GHC you are bound to use whatever dependency versions GHC was compiled with. In some cases these can be a bit dated which can lead to Cabal hell. I'm not really sure what can be done about this short of making Cabal/GHC more robust in the face of multiple dependency versions within the same build.

I read recently that Rust has some sort of symbol-mangling in place to allow multiple versions of the same library to co-exist within a single build. How feasible would it be to add this feature to GHC? At a first glance it seems like it would help substantially.