bindings-* packages provide low level bindings to well known foreign libraries like sqlite3 and libusb. They are supposed to be used by high level module developers who needs special functionality already available outside Haskell. Natural examples of such modules would be higher level versions of such bindings. bindings-common offers basic code that makes writing such packages easier, and provide a common design standard. http://hackage.haskell.org/package/bindings-common The major new feature of this release is the availability of hsc2hs custom macros, and a corresponding big reduction in code size. As an example, the code below is all that is necessary to write a Haskell version of a C struct, with Storable instance: -- This is 'hostent' struct from posix <netdb.h>: #bindings_starttype struct hostent #bindings_field h_name , CString #bindings_field h_aliases , Ptr CString #bindings_field h_addrtype , CInt #bindings_field h_length , CInt #bindings_field h_addr_list , Ptr CString #bindings_stoptype _ That results in http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/bindings-posix/0.0.2/doc/html/Bi... Those hsc2hs macros have been used to map the standard C library (see module Bindings.C), as well as posix standard library (in a separate package), and are made available to modules depending on bindings-common. Best, Maurício