I'm in support of this proposal. There is some discussion around the corners but lets get it done! Simon On Mon, 23 Jun 2025 at 14:12, Malte Ott via ghc-steering-committee < ghc-steering-committee@haskell.org> wrote:
Dear Committee,
Trevis Elser proposes a classification of (some) language extensions
On 2024-10-29 19:45, Adam Gundry wrote: based
on previous work in proposal #601 establishing categories:
https://github.com/telser/ghc-proposals/blob/initial-extension-categorizatio...
(Note that additionally to adding the new proposal the PR also contains a small diff to the previous proposal #601.)
This proposal rested for a while, but after some revisions at Zurihac I am recommending to accept this proposal. The proposal is the logical next step after the acceptance of #601. It’s not pretty to have a categorization but not use it and I think the classification is very helpful to guide users and us.
In the proposal Trevis nominates
72 extensions as stable, 10 extensions as deprecated, 5 extensions as legacy, 8 extensions as experimental
and
42 remain unclassified.
This only affects documentation and our future decisions. Only observable change in GHC will be that deprecated extensions consistently get a warning via -Wdeprecated-flags.
The intention is to basically just describe the status quo with the classification and defer all contentious extensions to be classified later.
My general tendency is that we should err in the direction of marking extensions stable because at least for widely used extensions, even those where we are not very happy with the design, marking them experimental is like giving us a free pass to break our stability principle. Also marking an extension stable is not the same as "recommended" as it is perfectly fine for an extension to be stable but not part of a GHCXXXX language edition.
Note that "For an extension to be classified as Stable it must be considered Stable when used in combination of all possible, non-mutually exclusive, extensions that are already Stable." I admit that I cannot judge this with certainty for all listed extensions. To be honest I learned e.g. of the existence of NoTraditionalRecordSyntax from reading the list. While I have been told that the categorization has been produced in close collaboration with GHC devs I ask everyone to keep this in mind when reviewing the list.
Please review the overall proposal and the proposed categories. You can give your approval conditional on moving some extensions to "unclassified". Others and I have already done so, so from my point of view the list is good as is.
Best, Malte _______________________________________________ ghc-steering-committee mailing list ghc-steering-committee@haskell.org https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-steering-committee