Duncan Coutts, Isaac Potoczny-Jones and I have just finished a short
proposal for this year's Haskell Symposium for a standard library platform for Haskell. Beyond just the core
libraries, this would provide a complete, stable base for the majority
of Haskell development, and a straightforward task for distros to
support Haskell - just provide the Haskell Platform.
The platform well and truly subsumes the current core and extra
libraries, and provide all the other nice libraries from Hackage, for networking,
databases,
data
and control structures, guis,
XML,
graphics and so on. Haskell with
batteries included, on every machine.
The plan is to have this all in place by the Haskell Symposium, so the
main challenge is to automate the production of the library quality
assurance. By September we hope to have at least one or two distros
fully supporting the platform (there are already tools to generate
distro native packages for at Arch, Gentoo, Fedora and Debian, so that
task is easy). Who knows, with any luck we may see Haskell on a few
distros, out of the box.
What do you think? Is the idea of a stable, comprehensive library suite
for Haskell, widely available, an attractive proposition as a developer?
On a related note, if you're a developer interested in FP, you might
consider attending the Developer Tracks on
Functional Programming, alongside the Commercial
Users of FP workshop at ICFP this year, in Vancouver. Lots of
practical talks on Haskell and Erlang for building commerical systems.
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