Adrian Hey wrote:
We have to have something concrete to discuss and this is the simplest. Like I said there are a dozen or so other examples in the base package last time I counted and plenty of people have found that other libs/ffi bindings need them for safety reasons. Or at least they need something that has "global" main/process scope and so far the unsafePerformIO hack is the only known way to get that and still keep APIs stable,sane and modular.
Actually all this use of the tainted and derogatory term "global variable" is causing me to be imprecise. All MVars/IORefs have "global" main/process scope whether or not they're bound to something at the top level. The purpose of the top level static binding is to prevent accidental or malicious "state spoofing" if it's important that the *same* IORef/MVar is always used for some purpose. Regards -- Adrian Hey