I published the May update for the #Haskell Core Libraries Committee (CLC) ✍️

🆕 4 new proposals
✅ 3 approved
🚫1 declined
🔥 1 hot discussion
💎 5 featured discussions with a common theme

Check it out 👇

https://discourse.haskell.org/t/clc-update-may-2023/6248

The longest and the most exhausting discussion for me personally is around the 'base' split and GHC internal modules.

It feels (to me personally) that the discussion is just circling around the same topics with no progress, and it's becoming too difficult to steer it 😞

The most controversial discussion is about adding types like Int8, Int16, Int32, Int64, Word8, etc. to Prelude.

Many people want it but many also are tired.

https://github.com/haskell/core-libraries-committee/issues/156

@chshersh pedantic numeric sizes are quoted by some as one of the biggest turn-offs in Rust dev ux. As long as they're optional and prelude has long arithmetic, should be fine though. Glad to see you involved with #haskell!

Have you tried #lean?

@jonn wait wait wait, there are people who are put off by the "pedantry" of having specific size types in Rust? Rust the language whose purpose is to have memory safety?

@hecate yeah, in practice we often just use i/u64, but also, big its are memory safe. I don't understand your surprise. Look at this implementation: https://github.com/tczajka/ibig-rs/blob/main/src/ubig.rs and buffer.rs there. I wouldn't hate to have this in #rust prelude.

@jonn @hecate As someone who spent some time trying to port cryptographic libraries from Rust to Haskell... I just gave up and decided to wrap the Rust libraries via the FFI. If Haskell wants to stay a higher-level language where you drop down to the FFI for performance, that's fine, though it does make me sad.

If Rust had a good capability-safe approach to managing side effects I might not come back to Haskell at all. As it is, the slow demise of Safe Haskell has me thinking that maybe there's not that much here for me anyway.

@nuttycom @hecate wrapping libs is the way! haskell-crypto is a libsodium wrapper for instance.

That said, I love how #lean ffi and typeclasses allow us to go gradually from verified code to ffi.

@jonn @hecate what are the most up-to-date resources on how to do good API design wrapping the FFI? This is something I still struggle with.