Fine. So long as the result of deserialising doesn’t change with time! It’s not clear what the “opt-in” mechanism would look like, but maybe you or Facundo can articulate a design? S From: Mathieu Boespflug [mailto:0xbadcode@gmail.com] Sent: 02 February 2016 14:38 To: ghc-devs@haskell.org; Simon Peyton Jones ; Edsko de Vries ; Facundo Domínguez Subject: Re: [GHC] #11526: unsafeLookupStaticPtr should not live in IO IMHO this dynamic linking thing is a red herring. In principle any function call becomes potentially impure given eg the ability to shadow symbols. In practice that's not something we do to programs. We could consider having two tables though: an initial tackle generated at compile time that will never change, and an aux table populated as new objects get linked in. Then programs can "opt in" to taking into account new objects loaded dynamically by reading (in IO) the aux table. Sent from my mobile. I'll have a look at the new material on the wiki shortly. It would be nice to close out the basic distributed story.