On 2016-05-03 at 00:57:38 +0200, John Wiegley wrote:
I wonder if there are GHC extensions we'd like to promote as features in the next report, as a starting point for discussing new additions.
There are a few GHC features that have become part of the regular Haskell landscape, such that it's hard to imagine a modern Haskell without them.
Btw, last year I computed a frequency-list of used extensions over Hackage packages[1]. I'm planning to recompute such a list over all of Hackage as well as over a Stackage subset. That would give us empirical popularity data besides the subjective data provided by the recent reddit discussion.
For example, MultiParamTypeClasses, OverloadedStrings, GADTs, TypeFamilies, etc.
How much "work" is typically involved in promoting a feature to be in the Report, and how do we determine when it's a bad idea?
As a concrete example of the problems formalising an extension, I'd like to point to the example of 'BangPatterns' which may appear to be also such a candidate and were considered for Haskell2014 already. Back then, Ian hit some roadblocks: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2013-February/003782.html Of course, I'm sure it would have been possible to resolve the open issues with a bit more persistence. :-) [1]: https://gist.github.com/hvr/fd4fa2f10d4a10c7ebcc -- hvr