microlens VS base64-bytestring

I'm a software engineer with 3 years of professional experience. I worked for 2 years at Microsoft on Azure Compute and now work at Google, working on improving Google search. I am the sole maintainer of the popular open-source library microlens with 80k downloads. I've also contributed to the Koka programming language developed at Microsoft Research.

microlens is a tiny van Laarhoven lenses library, mostly just copying definitions from lens and trying to avoid dependencies as much as possible. It has gained some popularity (742 package downloads in the last 30 days, vs the 1724 of the original lens).

Sure, if you consider Haskell's runtime (I know that technically GHC /= Haskell, but in practice it's the only Haskell that matters, except maybe something like Asterius) all the primitives are backed by C libraries: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-prim-0.4.0.0/docs/GH...

Likewise with conventions around pointers, arrays, etc. to the point where if you want to do anything really low-level or performance sensitive in Haskell, you're essentially punching a hole into C. As a random example, within the fast base64bytestring library, you find lots of use of `malloc`, `ForeignPtr` etc.: https://github.com/haskell/base64-bytestring/blob/master/Dat... And of course because this is C there aren't really many safety guarantees here.

The plan with Yatima with its primitives, and eventually when we write an FFI is to integrate with Rust in the same way that Haskell uses C. My hope is that with Yatima's affine types we might even be able to FFI to and from safe Rust (since the borrow checker uses affine types), but this is a little bit of a research project to see how much that works. Even to unsafe Rust though, we have better safety guarantees than C, since unsafe Rust's UB is still more restricted than C's is.