binary (rank 5/2200)
+0.5 Apart from the overlap with cereal, I'm missing a pretty important feature from the Binary class: custom monad state and support for seekable streams. For example, GHC has its own version of Binary to implement lookup tables: instead of writing a string wherever a 'Name' is needed, we write an index into a table that is constructed on the fly. Then we put the table at the end. (GHC actually writes the pointer back to the beginning of the file, but that's a different issue.) The seekable part is not so important, but as it is at the moment, you can't retro-fit this such side-effecting binary instances into the existing typeclass interface.
utf8-string (rank 7/2200)
I'd normally give it a +1, but it's API got a lot more complicated in more recent versions (some sort of attempt to make it more general). It now requires a very good tutorial to be able to read the documentation and look through all this type class haze.
ghc-paths (rank 15/2200) -- needed by haddock!
+0.5 It's very small and simple and needed by all ghc-api clients. I think it's fine on hackage, but it wouldn't be a big burden on the platform to include it, I think.
transformers (rank 18) -- related to mtl
+0.25 mtl doesn't provide Applicative instances for some types, which is why I use transformers + monads-fd. Monads are a bit of the mess at the moment; there's also monadLib and that new library underlying the monad zipper stuff (though that seemed very complicated last time I checked).
uniplate (rank 21) -- conflict with syb?
+1 No conflict, it's complementary to syb. It's very simple and it's very easy to build manual instances.
json (rank 28)
-1 It's very simple -- too simple -- and it's API is a bit awkward. It also uses Strings, no bytestrings, no Text. Because of this there're like 3+ similar libraries out there, all with various trade-offs.
text (rank 31)
+1 Already very nice, and once Bryan feels it's ready it should go right in.
Questions remain about what GUI lib to bring in, to augment the OpenGL suite.
* gtk2hs * wxHaskell
I'd love to see cairo(+pango) go in, but other than that I don't think either of these is ready for the platform just yet.