Hacker News Reader

> My personal rebuttal against this attitude is that it gets us stuck in extremely suboptimal equilibria. If we can never break anything, then every mistake must exist for perpetuity.

This is a problem that Rust solved really well with its "editions" concept. Unfortunately it's probably too late to retrofit such a thing onto Haskell.

View on HN

Haskell is standardized so it's impossible, while GHC can absolutely have editions. I think the infrastructure is already there, with the language extension mechanism and Cabal's default-language setting (e.g. Haskell2010, GHC2021 [1], etc.).

[1] https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/p...

That’s a very nice way of doing it. I wasn’t familiar with that feature, from the docs:

> The most important rule for editions is that crates in one edition can interoperate seamlessly with crates compiled in other editions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com