servant VS ghc-proposals

> do you really have to understand language extensions?

You do when your code doesn't compile and you're trying to figure out what the error message means, or when the library you want to use makes heavy use of it for even basic functionality.

> These days one just enables GHC2021

My experience was pre-GHC2021. I basically had to enable at a minimum 5-6 language extensions in every single file.

> Mostly they're just about removing unnecessary restrictions from the older standard.

Yeah, those ones are usually fine. I have zero objection to things like FlexibleInstances or DeriveFoldable.

> Could you give an example?

I believe I was trying to implement Central Authentication Service using Servant. However, that required returning a custom HTTP status code. There has been an open Github issue for this since 2017, but it seems to require basically rewriting the entire framework: https://github.com/haskell-servant/servant/issues/732

Looking back at it now Servant does have "ServerError", but that basically requires giving up all the advantages Servant claims to have and I believe it was not a viable option at the time. Looking at the timeline I was probably also on Servant 0.15, and there seems to have been a rewrite since then.

I vaguely recall running into a similar issue trying to interact with a database, but I can't remember the details of that.

a HasSwagger instance for NamedRoutes was added in May 2022 (in this commit) but there hasn't been a package release since March

If you don't like this style, the usual alternative is to change mkDualAuthHandler to take two additional arguments, Proxy tag0 and Proxy tag1 (as e.g. lots of Servant functions do, for historical reasons).

Dunno if this is helpful, but I found this github issue about ResourceT and servant https://github.com/haskell-servant/servant/issues/1345

And what about the cabal repl --with-compiler=doctest, which was added recently, in doctest v0.20? I recently submitted a PR for Servant to use this in place of GHC environment files, because it seems less finicky to me. Was this a bad idea?

I asked a somewhat relevant question recently. Maybe you'll find this discussion somewhat helpful: https://github.com/haskell-servant/servant/issues/1547; two packages were talked about. One of the folks from Well Typed replied, and said they tried it recently (and worked fine).

You are highly encouraged to test this release out and let us know what you think ! For bug reports, features requests or any kind of feedback, just open a ticket on our issue tracker.

Even slower than :<|> quadratic compile time in number of routes?

Check this out https://github.com/haskell-servant/servant/issues/335#issuecomment-172300487

This is really just a matter of how much syntax sugar you want to implement. Idris has this already, and there’s a proposal to add it to Haskell too [0]. But none of this changes the core properties of the system which make it monadic.

[0] https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/issues/527

> I think Haskell needs a way to graduate (or retire) language extensions

https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/601

Additionally, while this proposal is focused on the simple implementation and so in the current proposal or patterns do not bind any variables as per #522, if we do get settled on syntax and then later wish to expand to allow binding variables as in #43, then the syntax is again clean and discoverable.

Yeah, a relatively natural thing would be to be able to opt-in to having the HasField instances be available in all contexts. The (not yet implemented, but accepted) "Modifiers" GHC proposal might be nice for that.

The local modules proposal imo is excellent as-is.

Why would you drop TypeFamilies? It seems fairly popular, given that it was just one vote short of getting added to GHC2021. Do you consider it a less-ideal compromise, that is subsumed by your second proposal (Core with GRTT)?

as syntax is contentious a topic as ever, David (the main proposal author) and I would like to invite you to give your input on https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/585, where we propose to change the syntax of the accepted proposal #522 introducing Or patterns. In particular, we'd like to know

This looks great, congratulations on completing it! I assume you didn’t get an opportunity to evaluate the delimited continuations based eff library? It would’ve been nice to see Cont included as one of the effects covered, though perhaps not available in all the systems you looked at? Maybe some future work.

I do hope qualified exports are available someday: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/283

Right. Being able to disable "custom type warnings" at use sites was part of an earlier proposal (https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/454) but it ended up being shelved.