Haskell Platform proposal: Add the vector package

[Simon Marlow]

On 25/09/2012 15:29, Johan Tibell wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> After discussing this proposal at ICFP and with the Haskell Platform
> committee, we've decided that there's a rough consensus for adding
> vector to the platform.
>
> We will leave the following open issue for the future:
>
>   * Using SafeHaskell in the platform in general, and in vector in
> particular. This would be a large commitment for the platform, as we'd
> implicitly be telling our users that we've deemed the packages in the
> platform trustworthy. This is not something we should do without
> committing to making sure they are, which is something we are not
> willing to do just yet (as it requires a large amount of work, now and
> later). The vector package will be added without the .Safe modules
> (which no one wants).

With my "Safe Haskell pedantry" hat on, and at the risk of reviving that 
long thread, I would just like to point out that this is not quite 
right.  You would not be guaranteeing anything about Trustworthy 
modules: the point of Trustworthy is to tell the user which modules they 
need to trust in order to get the Safe Haskell guarantees.  The user 
gets to choose whether to actually trust the modules or not.

Note that GHC already comes with a lot of libraries that are marked 
Trustworthy, but we don't consider ourselves to have made any absolute 
guarantees about anything.

Trustworthy is badly named, it should really be called "TrustNeeded", or 
something.

Now of course we should go to reasonable efforts to make sure that those 
modules *are* trustworthy, but there's no need to do it all at once.  I 
think we should gradually move in the direction of safety, where it 
makes sense.

Cheers,
	Simon