Dear GHC Steering Committee
Over the last few weeks, Ben Gamari and I have been discussing with Andrew and Julian from the Core Libraries Committee how to make the Core Libraries Committee and the GHC developers work together more fluidly; and that includes the GHC Steering Committee.
I hope you like it. As far as this committee is concerned there are two particular points of note
- We propose a new package, ghc-experimental, which depends on base. Many GHC proposals involve defining new types and functions. The idea is that these would initially be in ghc-experimental. After they stabilise and become widely adopted, the author (or anyone else) can make a CLC proposal to move them to base, which has much stronger stability guarantees.
- Section 5.1 suggests a mechanism to involve CLC members in proposals that involve new functions and types, at an earlier stage. Some involve changing existing types and functions. It is clearly unproductive for us to debate such things at length, and only then to land it on the CLC.
Section 5.1 also suggests that proposals should explicitly (in a separate section) call out
- What new types and functions it defines
- What existing types and functions are changed.
We should add that to our template.
At the moment we are just sharing the proposal with relevant stakeholders (yourselves, CLC, stack folk, cabal folk etc), so that we can polish any rough edges before making it public.
So, any views? Personally I think this is a Big Step Forward.
Simon