Hi, I built an annotations system for GHC as part of my Summer of Code project on compiler plugins. Over the last few days, Tristan Allwood and myself have been working with the Simons on hashing out a refinement of that scheme which would be suitable for merging into GHC HEAD itself, and we now have a proposal we're broadly happy with (http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Annotations).
However, we need to choose a method for serialising annotations: our preferred method for doing this is to make use of the Hackage "binary" package (http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/binary) so annotations can make use of all the existing instances for the Binary class, and we can avoid implementing our own serialization library. However, doing so would, in our proposed scheme, require making binary a part of the GHC distribution (and since binary depends on bytestring, bytestring would become further entangled with GHC). This means that it won't be possible to upgrade the binary package in a sane way without installing a new GHC compiled against that new package, though as a sweetner we would be able to implement "deriving (Binary)". What is your reaction to this proposal, in particular the binary-package dependency issue I outline briefly above? Cheers, Max _______________________________________________ Cvs-ghc mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-ghc
