On Mon, 15 Jul 2013, Edward Kmett wrote:
It pretty much is the evolution of the SplitBase API effort.
One of the main reasons why Joachim joined the core libraries committee was to work on refining split base into an implementable specification.
I very like the splitting of the base package. I think this will also help other compilers to join the Cabal game. Currently it is hardly possible to compile an arbitrary package from Hackage with a compiler other than GHC, because every package depends on 'base'. If you want to make your package available for more compilers you have to provide a different Build-Depends list for every compiler you want to support. It would be cool to have packages that are warrantedly free of IO, in order to run them in environments where no IO is allowed (e.g. a web-server running submitted Haskell code). (The only objection I have, is to call a package without IO "pure-base", because IO is also purely functional in Haskell.)