Safe Haskell and Haskell Platform: near-term tactics

[Mark Lentczner]

There is already a thread discussing "safe" - this thread is to discuss
Safe Haskell in the context of our near-term (6 mos. to a year) work on
Haskell Platform.

It is my observation that Safe Haskell is a very new feature, and one that
is not yet widely used in the libraries. Further, there seems to be
considerable lack of experience, and clarity, even among the Haskell
heavy-weights, on how it should be applied, what the best practices are,
how to explain it to developers, etc....

Therefore, it seems to me that it can hardly be considered, at this point
in time, a stable main-stream dependable aspect of the system. I think we
should not consider it a requirement of libraries for addition to the
platform for the upcoming release (2012.4.0.0), nor the release after
(2013.2.0.0).

We should make Safe Haskell a featured part of the platform at the point at
which the ecology demonstrates a stable, consistent, inclusion of the
feature in the libraries, with understood best practices.

I recognize there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here: My
understanding (murky at best) of Safe Haskell, is that one needs to have a
majority of libraries using it for the system to reap the benefits. I
suspect that making Safe Haskell a featured part of the platform it will
require significant library coordination. For this reason, if none other,
I'd say that a plan to make Safe Haskell a prevalent part of the platform
should target 2013.4.0.0, *and start now.*

- Mark
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