CLC Update (June 2023)

[ChShersh]

As part of my Core Libraries Committee (CLC) involvement, I committed to writing monthly CLC updates, and this is the 4th update.

Previous update:

• CLC Update (May 2023)

All CLC work is done by volunteers in their free time.

Featured discussion

CLC and GHC developers agreed to have a discussion in person during ZuriHac 2023 about more efficient ways to collaborate, and how to proceed with the base split proposal.

ZuriHac is happening right now as I write this update. Unfortunately, I’m unable to attend the event this year, but I hope the outcomes of this discussion will be available publicly later.

Have fun everyone on ZuriHac!

New

List of newly opened proposals since the last update.

• #163: Add finalizer functions for ThreadId
• #164: base changes for exception backtrace proposal
• #166: Do not use O_NONBLOCK on regular files
• #167: Add foldl’ to Prelude
• #171: Hide GHC.TypeLits.Internal and GHC.TypeNats.Internal
• #172: Extend Data.Bitraversable API with firstA and secondA

Some proposals were reopened:

• #93: Add quantified superclasses to Bifoldable and Bitraversable

Approved

List of approved proposals since the last update.

• #126: Add mechanism for handling of WeakPtr finalizer exceptions
• #132: Codebuffer should use unboxed tuples for encoders/decoders
• #158: Make the type of (&) analogous to the one of ($)
• #160: Derive instance {Enum, Bounded, Num, Real, Integral} Compose f g a
• #165: Add Data.List.unsnoc :: [a] → Maybe ([a], a)
• #170: Add role annotations to SNat, SChar and SSymbol

Declined

List of rejected proposals since the last update.

None

Withdrawn

List of proposals withdrawn voluntarily by their authors.

• #168: Adding NonNullPtr to Foreign.Ptr
  • A proposal to add a new type-safe API around Foreign.Ptr was raised. However, during the discussion, it was discovered that the design space is big and it was advised to experiment with ideas outside base first.
• #169: Splitting containers
  • A proposal to split containers into 8 new libraries was raised by a containers maintainer (I remind that authors of core and boot libraries have the opportunity but not the obligation to consult CLC on impactful changes). CLC identified some potential problems with the split and recommended a less drastic approach.

Abandoned or Dormant

List of abandoned proposals due to lack of progress from the proposal author.

• #154: Support for unaligned reads/writes
  • The proposal author doesn’t have the capacity for steering the proposal at the moment.

Meta

List of CLC process updates and meta improvements.

After almost a year from the start of the proposal, an unresolvable backward incompatible change in foundation was discovered.

I recommend reading @Bodigrim’s statement on the subject.

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Feel free to share any feedback on these updates! Do you like the format? Do you like the granularity? Anything else